706 REVIEWS. 
eral interest. Professor Wyman, the curator, gives some exceed- 
ingly valuable ‘Observations on Crania and the parts of the 
Skeleton,” with comparative measurements of the fifty-six skulls 
from Peru, presented by Mr. Squier, together with thirty-eight 
from the mounds of Kentucky, obtained by Mr. Lyon, and 
eighteen from the mounds of Florida collected by the curator. He 
remarks that :— 
“The average capacity of the fifty-six Peruvian crania meas- 
ured agrees very closely with that indicated by Morton and Meigs, 
viz., 1230 c.c., or 75 cub. inches, which is considerably less than 
that of the barbarous tribes of America, and almost exactly that 
of the Australians and Hottentots as given by Morton and Meigs, 
and smaller than that derived from a larger number of measure- 
ments by Davis. Thus we have, in this particular, a race which ° 
has established a complex civil and religious polity, and made great 
progress in the useful and fine arts, as its pottery, textile fabrics, 
wrought metals, highways and aqueducts, colossal. architectural 
structures and court of almost imperial splendor prove, on the 
ame level as regards the quantity of brain, with a race whose 
social and religious conditions are among the most degraded exhi 
ited by the human race. 
this goes to show and cannot be too much insisted upon, 
‘that the relative capacity of the skull is to be considered merely 
as an anatomical and not as a physiological characteristic, and 
unless the quality of the brain can be represented at the same 
as the ntity, brain measurement cannot be assumed as an 
indication of the intellectual position of races any more than of 
individuals. From such results the question is very naturally 
forced upon us whether comparisons, based upon cranial measure- 
ments of capacity as generally made, are entitled to the value 
usually assigned them. Confined within narrower limits they may 
perhaps be of more importance. But even in this case the results 
are often contradictory. If the brains of Cuvier and Schiller 
were of the maximum size, so were those of three unknown indi- 
viduals from the common cemeteries of Paris— while that of 
Dante was but slightly above the mean, and Byron’s was probably 
even below it.” 
He also refers to the singular perforations of “the humerus, 
which seems to occur in white, Indian and black races, but more 
commonly in the blacks; it is also quite general though not con- 
stant in the apes. 
The flattening of the tibia has been noticed in the reindeer 
period in Europe, and Professor Wyman finds that it prevails 
largely, but in a variable degree in our Indians. In regard to the 
