HI COMPKESSIOK 01’ CiriLBEEU’s LIMBS. 
among half savage hordes, as in the most civilized part ot 
Europe, those inveterate animosities which have caused the 
names of hostile nations to pass into their respective lan- 
guages as insulting appellations. 
The missionary of the village of Cari led us into several 
Indian huts, where extreme neatness and order prevailed. 
Wc observed with pain the torments which the Carib 
mothers inflict on their infants, for the purpose not only 
of enlarging the calf of the leg, but also of raising the 
flesh in alternate stripes from the anldo to the top of the 
thigh. Narrow ligatures, consisting of bands of leather, or 
of woven cotton, are fixed two or three inches apart from 
each other, and being tightened more and more, the muscles 
between the bands become swollen. The monks of the mis- 
sions, though ignorant of the works or even ot the name of 
Eousseau, attempt to oppose this ancient system of physical 
education : but in vain. Man, when just issued from the 
woods, and supposed to be so simple in his manners, is far 
from being tractable in his ideas of beauty and propriety. I 
observed, however, with surprise, that the manner in which 
these poor children are bound, and which seems to obstruct 
the circulation of the blood, does not operate injuriously on 
their muscular movements. There is no race of men more 
robust, and swifter in rumiing, than the Caribs. 
If the women labour to form the legs and thighs of their 
children so as to produce what painters call undMating out- 
lines, they abstain (at least in the Llanos), from flattening 
the head, by compressing it between cushions and planks 
from the most tender age. This practice, so common hereto- 
fore in the islands and among several tribes of the Caribs of 
Parima and French Guiana, is not observed in the missions 
which we visited. The men there have foreheads rounder than 
those ot the Chaymas, the Otomacs, the Macos, the Maravi- 
tans, and most of the inhabitants of the Orinoco. A syste- 
matizer would say, that the form is such as their intellectual 
faculties require. We were so much the more struck by this 
fact, as some of the skulls of Caribs engraved in Europe, 
for works on anatomy, are distinguished from all other 
human skulls by the extremely depressed forehead and acute 
facial angle. In some osteological collections, skulls supposed 
to be those of Caribs of the island of St. Vincent are in fact 
