Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/752

732 elongated shape, have been found in great numbers in ancient tombs in the very region indicated by Herodotus. They have been found near Tiflis, where as many as one hundred and fifty were discovered at one time, and at other places in the Caucasus, generally in rock-tombs; also in the Crimea, and at different localities along the course of the Danube; in Hungary, Silesia, in the south of Germany, Switzerland, and even in France and Belgium. The people who have left such undoubted evidence of the practice of deforming their heads have been supposed by various authors to have been Avars, Huns, Tartars, or other Mongolian invaders of Europe; but later French authors, who have discussed this subject, are inclined to assign them to an Aryan race, who, under the name of Cimmerians, spread west-ward over the part of Europe in which their remains are now found, in the seventh or eighth century before our era. As the method of deformation in European specimens is not always identical, it is by no means certain that the custom may not have been in use among more than one nation. Whether the French habit, scarcely yet extinct, of tightly bandaging the heads of infants, is derived from these people, or is of independent origin, it is impossible to say.



In Africa and Australia no analogous customs have been shown to exist, but in many parts of Asia and Polynesia, deformations, though usually only confined to flattening of the occiput, are common. Though often undesigned, it is done purposely, I am informed by Mr. H. B. Low, by the Dyaks, in the neighborhood of Sarawak. Sometimes, in the islands of the Pacific, the head of the new-born infant is merely pressed by the hands into the desired form, in which case it generally