Humboldt on the Heads of the American Indians.

—In the first volume of his Researches, p. 131-2, Humboldt, giving an account of a Mexican monument in relief at Oaxaca, says,—“The pointed form of the heads is not less striking in the Mexican drawings than the size of the noses.

If we examine, osteologically, the skulls of the natives of America, we see, as I have elsewhere remarked, that there is no race on the globe in which the frontal bone is more flattened, or which have less forehead (Blum. tab. 46).

This extraordinary flattening exists among people of the coppercoloured race, who have never been acquainted with the custom of producing artificial deformities, as is proved by the skulls of Mexican, Peruvian, and Azteck Indians, which M.

Bonpland and myself brought to Europe, and several of which are deposited in the Museum of Natural History at Paris..... M.

Cuvier observes that the Grecian artists, in the statues of heroes, raised the facial angle from 85 to 100 degrees, or beyond the natural form. I am led to think that the barbarous custom, among certain savage tribes in America, of squeezing the heads of children between two planks, arises from the idea that beauty consists in this extraordinary compression of the frontal bone, by which nature has characterized the American race.

It is, no doubt, from following this standard of beauty, that even the Azteck people, who never disfigured the heads of their children, have represented their heroes and principal divinities with heads much flatter than any of the Caribs I saw on the lower Orinoco.”