* 
1886.] Anthropology. Ee 
1583, 1591 and 1601. The decisions are preserved, and there 
are not the slightest allusions to deformation.1 
Rivero and Tschudi? visited a large number of Peruvian tombs, 
examined the mummies in them, among others a foetus of seven 
months old, still in the mother’s womb, many children of all 
ages, and of adults, and having observed throughout the same 
cranial form, without the least vestige of depression nor of de- 
forming apparatus, they came to the conviction that this was the 
natural form of the head. 
- Robertson? examines no less minutely the platicephalic 
crania of the mound-builders of the United States, supposed to 
be deformed, and the analysis convinced him that the crania were 
natural. 
We have seen in a former citation that according to Casas the 
heads of Guatemala Indians deformed in times anterior to the 
discovery, had given rise by inheritance to crania spontaneously 
deformed. According to-other witnesses the same thing took 
place among the Omaquas of South America.* The practice 
having been attributed to these savages by Ulloa, an affirmation 
repeated in 1754 by Unarte, it results that this form of head is at 
present perfectly natural and that “ Children come into the world 
in this tribe and some others with the head dislocated.” 
The same result follows concerning the three races of Peru 
that exist at this moment with the same form of head that they 
tmerly had, without any need of deformatory practices. In the 
words of Rivero and Tschudi :> “ But there is one proof still more 
conclusive against the usage of mechanical means ; it is the 
actual existence of three races, in distinct although contracted 
areas, where we find no trace of bandage nor of pressure exer- . 
cised on the head of the new born. 
It is then demonstrated there is neither historic, scientific nor 
fational base for the affirmation that in Tropi i re 
were countries where the head was modified in form by mechani- © 
cal means. Nature by its own forces was entirely equal to the 
task of producing then and producing to-day these same forms i 
in many parts of the world. a 
This truth is still more evident in relation to the savages, called — 
Caribs, of the Lesser Antilles ; first, because none of the earliest 
chroniclers attribute to them a similar habit, and secondly, because rts 
tone has found the form of head that has been attributed to 
€m.— Fuan Ignacio de Armas. oe 
Leyes de Indias; Solerzano, Politica Indians; Hernaez, Coleccion de Balss. 
ma y ottos Documentos relativos a la Iglesia de America y Filipinàs. a : 
* Rivero et Tschudi. Antiquida des Perudnas. Vienna, 1851, p. 52. ees. 
ise y Les Mound Builders. Cong. Internat. d’Américanistes. Luxem- | 
barg, I, 43. re 
TRO. Los idiomas de la America lateria, Madrid, 106. 
-vero and Tschudi, of cit, 
