Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/624

606 M. Bonpland and myself, of which several were deposited in the Museum of Natural History at Paris. I am inclined to believe that the barbarous custom which prevails among several hordes of pressing the heads of children between two boards had its origin in the idea that beauty consists in such a form of the frontal bone as to characterize the race in a decided manner. … The Greeks in the statues of heroes have raised the facial line from 85° to 100° above nature (Cuvier, Anatomie comparée, Vol. II, p. 6). The Aztecs, who never disfigure the heads of their children, represent their principal divinities, as their hieroglyphical manuscripts prove, with a head much more flattened than any I have ever seen among the Caribs.

The occipital flattening of the head among the Polynesians seems due to the fact that this form of head was common and artificial means were used to accentuate the type.

A Hottentot father, suspecting that a child born with a prominent nose had been

We are prepared to find also that the preference for the prevailing type extends to the general type of female figure. Where this is naturally slender, the "cypress-slender" type is most