78 Professor D. Wilson’s Illustrations of the Significance 
they are described by traders and voyagers as acute and 
intelligent. They are, moreover, an object of dread to 
neighbouring tribes who retain the normal form of head, 
and look on the latter with contempt, as thus bearing the 
hereditary badge of slaves. 
The child born to such strange honours is laid, soon after 
its birth, upon the cradle-board, an oblong piece of wood, 
sometimes slightly hollowed, and with a cross-board pro- 
jecting beyond the head to protect it from injury. A small 
pad of leather, stuffed with moss or frayed cedar bark, is 
placed on the forehead and tightly fastened on either side 
to the board, and this is rarely loosed until its final removal 
before the end of the first year. The skull has then re- 
ceived a form which is only shghtly modified during the 
subsequent growth of the brain. But the very same kind 
of cradle is in use among all the Indian tribes. It is 
indeed varied as to its ornamental adjuncts and non- 
essential details ; but practically it resolves itself, in every 
case, into a straight board to which the infant is bound ; 
and as it is retained in a recumbent position, the pres- 
sure of its own weight, during the period when, as has been 
shown, the occipital and parietal bones are peculiarly soft 
and compressible, is made to act constantly in one direction. 
This I assume to have been the cause of the vertical or 
otherwise flattened occiput in the ancient British brachy- 
cephalic crania. ‘The same cause must tend to increase the 
characteristic shortness in the longitudinal diameter, and 
to shorten the zygoma, with probably also some tendency 
to make the arch bulge out in its effort at subsequent ~ 
growth, and so to widen the face. 
Dr J. Barnard Davis has applied the term “ parieto- 
occipital flatness,” where the results of artificial compres- | 
sion in certain British skulls extend over the parietals with 
the upper portion of the occipital ; aud he appears to re- 
gard this as something essentially distinct from the vertical 
occiput. But it is a form of common occurrence in Indian 
skulls, and is in reality the most inartificial of all the results 
of the undesigned pressure of the cradle-board. This will 
be understood by a very simple experiment. If the observer 
lie down on the floor, without a pillow, and then ascertain 
