274 Professor Daniel Wilson on the 
with nothing analogous to this among the most ingenious and 
constructive of the lower animals. 
Diverse physical characteristics have been noted among the 
various tribes of mankind, but concurrent opinion points to 
the head and face as embodying the most discriminating tests 
of ethnic variety. Yet these are the very features most 
affected by artificial appliances. Tatooing, nose, lip, and ear 
piercing ; filing, staining, and extracting the teeth; staining 
the eyelids, shaving and plucking the head and beard, all 
effect important changes on the physiognomy. Nor is the 
head more constant in its proportions. Undesignedly and 
with deliberate purpose alike, artificial means tend to modify 
the shape of the human skull, and so to introduce elements of 
confusion and error into any system of classification based on 
cranial conformation, in which such sources of change are 
overlooked. In one respect, however, the American ethnolo- 
gist might seem to incur little risk of such oversight. The 
barbarous custom of giving artificial forms to the skull is 
practised as sedulously at the present day among the Flat- 
“head tribes of the Pacific, as by the Peruvians before the con- 
quest of Pizarro, or on the shores of the EKuxine among the 
Scythian Macrocephali in the days of Hippocrates. The 
effects resulting from this practice have accordingly assumed 
a prominent place among the phenomena specially distinctive 
of American ethnology. But, on this very account, such arti- 
ficial cranial distortion, especially among ancient and modern 
American tribes, now receives so much attention from the 
craniologist, that we are apt not only to forget how entirely 
this barbarous practice had been lost sight of until the recent 
revival of the subject, as one necessarily involved in deter- 
mining the true significance of generic forms of the human 
head in the deductions of physical ethnology; but also to 
ignore all other causes tending to produce corresponding 
results. 
The possibility of artificial modifications of the form of the 
human skull, after having been denied by Sabatier, Camper, 
and Artaud, was reasserted in strong terms by Blumenbach, 
when describing a flattened Charib skull brought from the 
island of St Vincents. Nevertheless opinions oscillated with 
