Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/367

Rh ones, which, also, is not common. I must leave it undecided whether the sharpening is done by filing or by breaking off pieces from the sides. The latter should be in general far more frequent. In every case the otherwise broad and flat teeth are brought to such sharp points as to project like those of the carnivorous animals. I have met with this condition several times on Negrito skulls and furnished illustrations of them. On a Zambal skull, excavated by Dr. A. B. Meyer and which I lay before you, the deformation is easy to be seen. I called attention at the time to the fact that among the Malays an entirely different method of modifying the teeth is in vogue, in which a horizontal filing on the front surface is practised and the sharp lower edge is straightened and widened. Already the elder Thévenot has accentuated this contrast when he says:

“These cause the teeth to be equal, those file them to points, giving them the shape of a saw.”

This difference appears to have held on till the present; at least no skull of an Indio is known to me with similar deformation of the teeth. This custom of the Negritos is so much more remarkable since the chipping of the corners of the teeth is widely spread among the African blacks.

The other part of the body used most for deformation—the skull—is in strong contrast to the last-named custom. Deformed crania, especially from older times, are quite numerous in the Philippines; probably they belong exclusively to the Indies. If they exist among the Negritos, I do not know it; the only exception comes from the Tinguianes, of whom J. de los Reyes reports their skulls are flattened behind (por detrás oprimido). Such flattening is found, however, not seldom among tribes who have the practise of binding children on hard cradle boards—chiefly among those families who keep their infants a long time on such contrivances. A sure mark by which to discriminate accidental pressure of this sort from one intentionally produced is not at hand; it may be that in accidental deformation oblique position of the deformed spot is more frequent; at any rate, the difference in the Philippines is a very striking one, since there not so much the occiput as the front and middle portions suffer from the disfigurements, and thereby deformations are produced that have bad their most perfect expression among the ancient Peruvians and other American tribes.

I have discussed cranial deformation of the Americans in greater detail, where I exhibit the accidental and the artificial (intentional)