Karl Pearson 
341 
be taken into account. If, after doing this and comparing these representations 
with any long typical series of Peruvian and New Hebridoan skulls, he had not 
concluded with anatomists and anthropologists like Scott, Poll, Flower, Turner and 
Duckworth, that there is no question of deformation — I will not suggest that he 
should have analysed numerically the extraordinary differences in absolute lengths 
as well as indices between deformed and natural series — he- should have criticised 
in the first place the obtuseness of these anatomical craniologists* who could 
overlook such a fundamental point ! 
Professor Giufifrida-Ruggeri does not adopt such a course. He takes one out 
of ten of Thomson's normae laterales and says this skull is artificially deformed 
ergo the series as a whole is ai'tificially deformed, ergo all these elaborate 
biometrical investigations here (and no doubt elsewhere) are idle. To point the 
moral as strongly as possible, the inference drawn from a single photograph of a 
single skull is carried to a sweeping conclusion in the title of the Professor's 
memoir. It runs "A proposito della leptorrinia dei Moriori e della loro defor- 
mazione cranicaf." On such a slender basis the Moriori race, according to Pro- 
fessor Giuffrida-Rugge^'i, henceforth is to be looked upon — not as one with most 
noteworthy cranial characters — but merely as a race with a self-distorted cranium. 
He does indeed say that Poll — without suspecting the deformation — has drawn 
attention to the markedly receding frontal, but this had also been done by Scott 
and Duckworth. Thomson, however, was the first to show that the Moriori have a 
smaller frontal index than any other measured race, and this is how Giuffrida- 
Ruggeri sums up the biometric work on the point after referring to p. 95 of her 
memoir : 
Altri calcoli piu prccisi — ma imitili — si leggone a p. 130. Auche a p. 110 altre valutazioiii 
dell' appiattimento dell'osso frontale — niolto complicate, ma fuori di posto, essendo viziate della 
stessa inavvertenza morfologica— daiiiio rijsultati sfavorevoli ai Moriori e non potrebbe essere 
diversamente (p. 7 of offprint). 
Why indeed must the Moriori be an artificially deformed race ? Simply because a 
flat frontal is " not a character of the South Oceanic races," and therefore its very 
existence must be interpreted as a deformation. But this is to beg the funda- 
mental question of whether the Moriori were a "South Oceanic race" or whether, pure 
or hybridised, they were a still earlier race being pushed to the extremes by a 
South Oceanic racial invasion. The question of deformation has to be settled quite 
apart from whether a flat frontal is or is not a character of the " South Oceanic 
races." And it has to be settled appreciatively or quantitatively by comparing a 
series of the Moriori against a series where deformation is admitted to be practised. 
Postponing for a time the question of quantitative measurement!, I examined the 
Peruvian and New Hebridean series in the Royal College of Surgeons Museum as 
a whole against the Moriori series, and have no doubt that the Moriori as a race 
* More than one of thera had actually examined in whole or part the series studied by Thomson ! 
t Rendi della JR. Accademia delle Scienze Fisiclic e Mat lie mat i die di Napoli, Ser. 3''', Vol. xxvii, 1921. 
X For example the cephalic index of the male Moriori is 76- 1.5 with a standard deviation of 2 '58, but 
that of 47 Peruvian male crania is 89'15 with a standard deviation of 8'25!! 
Biometrika xiii ■ 22 
