484 7 General Notes. [May, . 
Casas had no faith in the charge of anthropophagy made against 
the Indians by the conquefors of the new world, an accusation 
which he attributed to a desire for a pretext to enslave the 
savages. 
Still more strange is it that neither Casas nor any other of the 
earlier historians speak of the Indians called Caribs as applying 
to the heads of their infants apparatus to change the form—an 
ominous silence when we consider that these same writers are 
full of detail, false or true, relative to these same savages. In a 
word, Columbus, Chanca, Americus Vespucius, Bernal_ Diaz, 
Peter Martyr, En Ciso, Ferdinand Columbus, Las Casas, Oviedo, 
Gomara and many others for a century and a half after the dis- 
covery are unanimously silent about the artificial deformation of 
the cranium attributed in later times to the early inhabitants of 
the Lesser Antilles. 
If the first witnesses and chroniclers on America are mute 
ve regarding deformation, they describe with great exactness the 
heads of the indigenes of these islands, and the result is that the 
skulls are very elevated in the crown. : 
he most ancient and authoritative of these witnesses, Christo- 
pher Columbus; declares that the inhabitants of the Antilles, the 
Greater and the Lesser, and those of Terra Firma, resemble one 
another in respect to their natural form, with wide foreheads and 
heads well elevated. 
There were not in the Antilles the two races as alleged, but one 
uniform race without variation of physical characters. ‘This 1s $0 
/ Americus Vespucius, who saw the same Indians on the gree 
as well as on the coast, compares their visages with that of the 
7 Tartars, who have the forehead very wide. 
dians of these isles consisted in the pretended wearing long hair 
_ by the Caribs and the wearing by the women of a kind of cotton 
` -bands around the legs above and below the calf. ae 
o Be iaz, who never lived in America, but who saw 4 
Seville some hundreds of Indians sent to be sold under the unjust 
: < y are 1 Hire 
_ others, only they have this evil custom. In all the islands 
` TF, Colon. Vida del Almirante, cap. 89. Casas. Historia, 111, 109, 113+ 
s ier Navigatum. 1, 35 
m Chanca. Lettre au Municipe de Seville, Jan., 1494. Coll. de Navarrete, 23 
ae. z 
_ *Bernal Diaz. Historia de los Reyes Católicos, cap. 118. 
