Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/368

358 deformation in their principal forms. The result is that in large sections of America scarcely any ancient skulls are found having their natural forms, but that the practise of deformation has not been general; moreover, a number of deformation centers may be differentiated which stand in no direct association with one another. The Peruvian center is far removed from that of the northwest coast, and this again from that of the Gulf States. From this it must not be said that each center may have had its own, as it were, autochthonous origin. But the method has not so spread that its course can be followed immediately. Rather is the supposition confirmed that the method is to be traced to some other time, therefore that somewhere there must have been a place of origin for it. On the Eastern Hemisphere, and especially in the region here under consideration, the relations are apparently otherwise. Here exist, so far as known, great areas entirely free from deformation; small ones, on the other hand, full of it. There are here, also, deformation centers, but only a few. Among these, with our present knowledge, the Philippines occupy the first place.

The knowledge of this, indeed, is not of long duration. Public attention was first aroused about thirty years ago concerning skulls from Samar and Luzon, gathered by F. Jagor from ancient caves, to furnish the proof of their deformation. Up to that time next to nothing was known of deformed crania in the oriental island world. First through my publication the attention of J. G. Riedel, a most observant Dutch resident, was called to the fact that cranial deformation is still practised in the Celebes, and he was so good as to send us a specimen of the compressing apparatus for infants (1874). Compressed crania were also found. But the number was small and the compression of the separate specimens was only slight. In both respects what was observed in the Sunda islands did not differ from the state of the case in the Philippines. Through Jagor's collections different places had become known where deformed crania were buried. Since then the number of localities has multiplied. I shall mention only two, on account of their peculiar position. One is Cagraray, a small island east of Luzon, in the Pacific Ocean, at the entrance of the Bay of Albay; the other, the island of Marinduque, in the west, between Luzon and Mindoro. From the last-named island I saw, ten years ago, the first picture of one in a photograph album accidentally