of certain Ancient British Skull Forms. 17 
describing to me the same appearance, as witnessed by him 
on the Columbia River, compared the eyes to those of a 
mouse strangled in a trap. The appearance is little less 
singular for some time after the child has been freed from 
the constricting bandages, as shown in an engraving from 
one of Mr Kane’s sketches of a Chinook child seen by him 
at Fort Astoria.* In after years, the brain, as it increases, 
partially recovers its shape; and in some of the deformed 
adult skulls, one suture gapes while all the rest are ossified, 
and occasionally a fracture or false suture remains open. 
An adult skull, of the same extremely deformed shape, 
among those brought home by the Exploring Expedition, 
illustrates the great extent to which the brain may be sub- 
jected to compression and malformation without affecting 
the intellect. It is that of a Nasqually chief, procured 
from his canoe-bier in Washington Territory. (No. 4549.) 
The internal capacity, and consequent volume of brain, is 
95 cubic inches. The head is compressed into a flattened 
disc, with the forehead receding in a straight line from the 
nasal suture to the crown of the head, while the lamb- 
doidal suture is on the same plane with the foramen mag- 
num. ‘The sutures are nearly all completely ossified, and 
the teeth ground quite flat, as is common with many of the 
tribes in the same region, and especially with the Walla- 
walla Indians on the Columbia River, who live chiefly on 
salmon dried in the sun, and invariably impregnated with 
the sand which abounds in the barren waste they occupy. 
IT assume the unimpaired intellect of the Nasqually chief 
from his rank. The Flathead tribes are in the constant 
habit of making slaves of the round-headed Indians; but 
no slave is allowed to flatten or otherwise modify the form 
of her child’s head, that being the badge of Flathead aris- 
tocracy. As this has been systematically pursued since 
ever the tribes of the Pacific coast were brought under the 
notice of Europeans, it is obvious that if such superinduced 
deformity developed any general tendency to cerebral dis- 
ease, or materially affected the intellect, the result would 
be apparent in the degeneracy or extirpation of the Flat- 
head tribes. But so faris this from being the case, that 
* Prehistoric Man, vol. ii. p. 820. 
