REVIEWS AND BOOK NOTICES. ~ 625 
discovery, by Dr. Lund, in Brazil, ‘‘of human bones of both sexes 
entirely preserved and partially petrified; in fact, truly fossil 
bones, mixed with those of gigantic and extinct animals,*” “and 
points out the similarity of the crania from Brazil with authentie 
mound-builders’ skulls, that similarity being “a remarkable de- 
ficiency of the frontal eminences, amounting to an almost entire 
absence of the forehead,” and further adds, ‘+ a type which we find 
delineated on the monuments of Mexico and Central America and 
which is seen in the crania recovered from the shores of Lake 
Michigan and the banks of the Wabash and Mississippi.” 
These mound-builders’ skulls, it appears, from Dr..Foster’s re- 
searches, ‘differ on the one hand from the Indian type, which is 
brachycephalic, and from the Teutonic, on the other, which is 
dolicocephalic.- They are intermediate, or orthocephalic ;” and, 
after giving some craniological details, adds, “I think we are jus- 
tified in drawing the conclusion that the mound-builders were not 
the ancestors of North American Indians.” 
The conclusion drawn being that orthocephalic mound-builders 
could not or did not degenerate into redmen, who according to 
Retzius are brachycephalic, “on that side of our continent which 
looks towards Asia and the isles of the Pacific” and dolicoce- 
phalic along’ the Atlantic seaboard, being nearly related to the 
Guanches of the Canary Islands, and the Caribs— but that “the 
primeval people of Brazil, the Huanchas of Peru, the platform 
builders of Mexico and the mound-builders of the Mississippi 
alley” were closely allied people. Of these, however, Dr. 
Foster distinctly states that the latter are orthocephalic; while 
Retzius describes the others as decidedly dolicocephalic. If 
therefore both authors are correct, we cannot trace the connec- 
tion between the mound-builders, as described by Dr. Foster, and 
the races described by Retzius, to whom our author refers so 
frequently, as to the characteristics of their crania. And, on the 
other hand, if the orthocephali are derived from dolicocephalic 
autochthones of Brazil, why may not their descendants have be- 
Come, by sexual selection, brachycephalic redmen, or indeed re- 
verted to the ancestral dolicocephalic form? The fossil men of 
Geræs may be the ancestors of the mound-builders, but do 
the craniological details brought forward by Dr. Foster, of them- 
selves prove it? j 
ATE 
*Journ. Anthrop. Inst, London: Vol. ii, p. 408. 
AMER. NATURALIST, VOL. VII. 40 
