31 



If the women labour to form the legs and 

 thighs of their children so as to produce what 

 the painters call undulating outlines, they ab- 

 stain, at least in the Llanos, from flattening the 

 head, by compressing it between cushions and 

 planks from the most tender age. This usage, 

 so common heretofore in the islands, and among 

 several tribes of the Caribbees of Parima and 

 French Guyana, is not practised in the missions 

 which we visited. The men there leave the 

 forehead rounder than the Chaymas, the Oto- 

 macks, the Macoes, the Maravitans, and the 

 greater part of the inhabitants of the Oroonoko. 

 A systematizer would say, that it is such as 

 the intellectual faculties require. We were so 

 much the more struck by this observation, as 

 the skulls of Caribbees engraved in Europe*, in 

 some works of anatomy, are distinguished from 

 all other human skulls by the most depressed 

 forehead, and the most acute facial angle. But 

 in osteological collections the productions of 

 art have been confounded with the state of 

 nature. What are shown as the skulls of Ca- 

 ribbees of the island of Saint Vincent, " almost 

 destitute of forehead," are skulls shaped between 

 planks, and belonging to Zamboes (black Carib- 



* I shall only mention as an example a plate drawn by the 

 illustrious anatomist Peter Camper : Viri adulti cranium, ex 

 Caraibensium insula Sancti-Vicentii in Museo Clinii asservat, 

 1785. 



