Comparative Anatomy of Man 1

Abstract

II. WITH regard to the cranial characters of the Americans the same difference of statement is met with as in respect to their external appearance. Morton's assertion of the general sameness in the skulls from all parts of the continent has been contested by others. But the controversies relating to this subject have nearly all turned upon one character alone, that is, the relative breadth of the cranium compared to its length, to the neglect of many others probably of equal importance. The prevalence of artificial cranial deformity, spoken of in a previous lecture, causes some difficulty by limiting the number of crania possessing their natural form at our disposal; but still there is sufficient evidence to show great variation in the cephalic index of American skulls. Although such extreme dolichocephaly as is met with among the Eskimo is very rare among true Americans, the larger number of crania of Indians, excepting those inhabiting the west coast of North America, and the region west of the Andes in South America (Peru and Bolivia), as well as Patagonia, in all of which regions brachycephaly prevails, are either mesaticephalic or moderately dolichocephalic. But the two forms are curiously intermixed, or at all events found in different tribes inhabiting contiguous regions, much, in fact, as they are in Europe. As the inhabitants of the two extreme ends of the continent, the Eskimo and the Fuegians, are both dolichocephalic (though in the case of the latter the evidence of cranial form is not yet so complete as might be wished), and as certain skulls, apparently of great antiquity, which have been discovered in Patagonia and Brazil are of the same form, it has been conjectured that the primitive inhabitants of the continent were a race with long and narrow heads, and that the brachycephalic race are later intruders.