THE CHARIBS. 



239 



would not do what was required, or any thing else. When desired to hunt or 

 shoot game, they chose to fish, and probably would neglect the very employment 

 they chose."* Chanvallon declares that their stupid eyes were the mirror of 

 their souls, and that " their reason is not more enlightened than the instinct of 

 brutes." They kept their women in the vilest servitude, and instilled into the 

 minds of their children the love of cruelty and slaughter. 



One of the most remarkable facts connected with these people, was their 

 custom of flattening the skulls of their offspring. That which has been often 

 doubted, is now reduced to certainty: yet it must be admitted as a singular 

 circumstance, that Peter Martyr makes no mention of it ; and even Humboldt 

 thinks that it was confined to the Black Charibs, who were of Negro descent.f 

 That this is an error is proved by the fact of the continental ancestors of the 

 Insular Charibs having practised the custom in very distant times ; by its being 

 recorded by Rochefort, who wrote his account before the Black Charibs were 

 known in St. Vincent ;J and by the personal testimony of several later voyagers. 

 M. Amic, who was in Guadaloupe in 1791, saw both Charibs and Negroes with 

 flattened heads, and obtained from them the apparatus by which the deformity 

 was effected. § Mr. Lawrence has figured the head of a Red Charib chief who 

 was well known in St. Vincent ;|| and Humboldt has represented both the natural 

 and artificial configuration, the former differing in nothing from the ordinary 

 Indian head. 



The annexed illustration of the Charib skull, is derived from a cast in the 

 possession of the Phrenological Society of this city : the original is preserved, I 

 believe, in the Royal Museum at Paris ; and it is the same which Gall and 

 Spurzheim have figured in their great work on the Nervous System. A few 

 diameters are all the measurements that can be obtained from the cast. 



MEASUREMENTS. 



Longitudinal diameter, 

 Parietal diameter, 

 Frontal diameter. 

 Vertical diameter, 



• • 



• • 



7.2 inches. 

 5.7 inches. 

 4.5 inches. 

 5.1 inches. 



* Sheldon, in Archseolog. Amer. I, p. 411. 



J Histoire des Antilles, published in 1671. 



§ Journal de Physique, Tome XXXIX, for 1791. 



t Pars. Narr. VI, p. 31. 



Lectures on Zoology, &c., Plate X. 



