272 Professor Daniel Wilson on the 
under the pressure, while the mastoid processes are twisted 
obliquely, so that the left one is upward of an inch in advance 
of the right. 
The circumstances under which this Indian skull was found 
tend to throw some light on the probable process by which its 
posthumous malformation was affected. It was covered by 
little more than two feet of soil, the pressure of which was 
in itself insufficient to have occasioned the change of form. 
The skull, moreover, was entirely filled with the fine sand 
in which it was embedded. - If, therefore, we conceive of the 
body lying interred under this slight covering of soil until 
all the tissues and brain had disappeared, and the infiltra- 
tion of fine sand had filled up the hollow brain-case; and 
then, while the bones were still replete with animal matter, 
and softened by being filled with moist sand and embedded 
in the same, if some considerable additional pressure, such 
as the erection of a heavy structure, or the sudden accumu- 
lation of any weighty mass, took place over the grave, the 
internal sand would present sufficient resistance to the su- 
perincumbent weight applied by nearly equal pressure on all 
sides, to prevent the crushing of the skull or the disruption 
of the bones, while these would readily yield to compres- 
sion of the mass as a whole. The skull would thereby be 
subjected to a process in some degree analogous to that by 
which the abnormal developments of the Flathead crania are 
effected during infancy, involving, as it does, great relative 
displacement of the cerebral mass, but little or no diminution 
of the internalcapacity. The discovery of numerous traces of 
domestic pottery, pipes, stone implements, and weapons, in the 
same locality, furnishes abundant proof that it was the site of 
the Indian village as well as the cemetery, and thereby de- 
monstrates the probability of the erection of such a structure, 
or the accumulation of some ponderous mass over the grave, 
at a period so near to that of the original interment as would 
abundantly suffice to produce the change of form described. 
To some such causes similar examples of posthumous cranial 
malformation must be ascribed; as they are so entirely excep- 
tional as to preclude the idea of their resulting from the mere 
pressure of the ordinary superincumbent mass of earth. 
