This cranium (and another received with it) has that remarkable sugar-loaf form which renders them high and broad in front, with a short antero-posterior diameter, both the forehead and occiput bearing evidence of long continued compression. They correspond precisely with the descriptions given by Cieza, Torquemada and others among the earliest travellers in Peru, who saw the natives in various parts of the country with heads rounded precisely in this manner.[8-*]
The second head figured, (fig. 3,) is that of a Natchez Indian,[8-+] obtained from a mound not far from that city by the late Mr. James Tooley, Jr., and by him presented to me. The face in this, as in the former instance, has all the characteristics of the native Indian; and the cranium has undergone precisely the same process of artificial compression, although these tribes were separated from each other by the vast geographical distance of four thousand miles!
Could we discover the cranial remains of the older Mexican nations, we should doubtless find many of them to possess the same fanciful type of conformation;[8-++] for if either of the skulls figured above could be again clothed in flesh and blood, would we not have restored to us the very heads that are so abundantly sculptured on the monuments of Central America, and so graphically described by Herrera, when he tells us that the people of Yucatan _flattened their heads and foreheads_?
The following diagrams are copied, on an enlarged scale, from Mr. Stephens's Travels,[8-§] and will serve in further illustration of this interesting subject. They are taken from bas-reliefs in the _Palace at Palenque_. The personage fig. 4, (whose head-dress we have partly omitted,) appears to be a king or chieftain, at whose feet are two suppliants, naked and cross-legged, of whom we copy the one that preserves the most perfect outline, (fig. 5.)
The principal figure has better features and expression than the other, but their heads are formed on the same model; whence we may infer that if the suppliant is a servant or a slave of the same race with his master, the artificial moulding of the cranium was common to all classes. If, on the other hand, we assume that he is an enemy imploring mercy, we come to the conclusion that the singular custom of which we are speaking, was in use among other and surrounding nations; which latter inference is confirmed by other evidence, that, for example, derived from the Natchez tribe, and the clay effigies so abundantly found at the ruined temples of the sun and moon at Teotihuacan, near the city of Mexico.[9-*]
