269 
On Some Modifying Hlemenis affecting the Ethnic Signifi- 
cance of Peculiar Forms of the Human Skull. By DANIEL 
Witson, LL.D., Professor of History and English Litera- 
ture, University College, Toronto. 
The antiquity and wide geographical diffusion of the prac- 
tice of cranial deformation on the American continent have 
tended in some degree to divert the attention of craniologists 
from causes, some at least of the operations of which have 
been long recognised in other departments of natural history. 
The paleontologist is familiar with the occurrence of skulls 
distorted or completely flattened, and even with solid bones 
and shells greatly changed in form by compression. It was 
due to such compression transforming the skull of a fossil 
batrachian into some rude resemblance of the human cranium, 
that the famous Cryptobranchus Scheuchzeri, found in a 
quarry at Giningen in 1725, was announced to the world in 
M. Scheuchzer’s “ Homo Diluvii Testis et Theoscopos,”’ as 
the remains of one of the sinful antediluvians who perished in 
the Noahic deluge! In some of such examples, the paleon- 
tologist looks in reality only on the cast of the ancient bone 
or shell, compressed, along with its matrix, probably at a date 
long subsequent to its original deposition. But in the fol- 
lowing examples of similar changes affecting the human skull, 
it will be seen that the distortion by which the Grania now 
referred to have acquired their abnormal shapes must have 
taken place at no Jong period subsequent to inhumation, 
while the animal matter still remained in such abundance as 
to preserve the flexibility of the bones; and even in some 
cases, when the soft tissues still existed, to resist the fracture 
consequent on the pressure of the superimposed weight of 
earth or stone. _ 
In the Museum of the University of Toronto, a female 
skull is now preserved, recovered in 1859 from an ancient 
Indian cemetery on the Georgian Bay. It is marked by con- 
siderable prolongation of the occiput, and is essentially a 
dolichocephalic cranium ; but the natural excess in the longi- 
tudinal diameter has been exaggerated by great lateral com- 
pression, under which the left parietal and temporal bones, 
NEW SERIES.—VOL. XIV. No. 11.—ocrT. 1861, 2M 
