G28 
istic, which the distinguished Professor of Zoology at Ley- 
den, van der Hoeven, attributed to the Negro races in 
general, in his classical work on those people. Among 
about a dozen crania of New Caledonians and allied 
])eople, in my collection, every one presents the full, long, 
protuberant occiput, which is as much peculiar to the race 
as their prognathousness. But a skull of a New Caledo- 
nian has just reached me, from my friend, D:r Geo. Bex- 
XETT of Sydney, New South AVales, wdiich was obtained 
on the summit of a peak, called by the French Dead- 
man’s Peak, from the natives exposing their dead there, 
at Kanala,- on the eastern coast of New Caledonia. This 
tine cranium, which has been exposed to the action of tire, 
is much distorted and appears to me a good example of 
what I have called parieto-occipital flattening. This flat- 
tening is much contined to the right side of the occipital 
region, and is accompanied 'with the interi)arietal com- 
pensatory expansion, which is very irregular in this spe- 
cimen, as well as the frontal flattening on the o]>posite, 
or left side. I have no reason to think that, in this case, 
the distortion is the result of a custom among the islan- 
ders, but that it is an individual deformation dependent 
on some caprice of the mother. 
An extensive series of skulls of the races of the Hi- 
malayan mountains, from Nepal, Sikim, Butan, as well as 
the pestilential Tarai, 1 owe to the kindness of ]\I:r Beyan 
Hodgson, so celebrated lor his researches into the philo- 
logy and natural history of these countries. They vary a 
good deal in their forms, yet exhibit much of that broad, 
flat-faced, broad-headed character which has been regarded 
as distinctive of Blumenbach’s Mongolian class. 
