Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/753

Rh soon recovers that which Nature intended for it. In one island alone, Mallicollo, in the New Hebrides, the practice of permanently depressing the forehead is almost universal, and skulls are even found constricted and elongated exactly after the manner of the Aymaras of ancient Peru.

Though the Chinese usually allow the head to assume its natural form, confining their attentions to the feet, a certain class of mendicant devotees appear to have succeeded to a remarkable extent in getting their skulls elongated into a conical form, if the figure in Picart's "Histoire des Religions," vol. iv., plate 131, is to be trusted.

America is, however, or rather has been, the headquarters of all these fantastic practices, and especially along the western coast, and mainly in two regions, near the mouth of the Columbia River in the north, and in Peru in the south. The practice also existed among the Indians of the southern part of what are now the United States, and among the Caribs of the West India Islands. In ancient Peru, before the time of the Spanish conquest, it was almost universal. In an edict of the ecclesiastical authorities of Lima, issued in 1585, three distinct forms of deformation are mentioned. Notwithstanding the severe penalties imposed by this edict upon parents persisting in the practice, the custom was so difficult to eradicate that another injunction against it was published by the Government as late as 1752.



In the West Indies, and the greater part of North America, the custom has become extinct with the people who used it; but the Chinook Indians, of the neighborhood of the Columbia River, and the natives of Vancouver Island, continue it to the present day, and this is the last stronghold of this strange fashion, though under the influence of European example and discouragement it is rapidly dying out. Here the various methods of deforming the head and their effects have