nds. The first of
these subjects is represented by the subjoined wood-cut, (fig. 2.) It
was politely sent me by Dr. John Houstoun, an intelligent surgeon of the
British Navy, with the following memorandum: "From an ancient town
called Chiuhiu, or Atacama Baja, on the river Loa, and on the western
edge of the desert of Atacama. The bodies are nearly all buried _in the
sitting posture_, [the conventional usage of most of the American
nations from Patagonia to Canada,] with the hands either placed on each
side of the head, or crossed over the breast."[7-+]

This cranium (and another received with it) has that remarkable
sugar-loaf form which renders them high and broad in front, with a short
antero-posterior diameter, both the forehead and occiput bearing
evidence of long continued compression. They correspond precisely with
the descriptions given by Cieza, Torquemada and others among the
earliest travellers in Peru, who saw the natives in various parts of the
country with heads rounded precisely in this manner.[8-*]

[Illustration: Fig. 3.]

The second head figured, (fig. 3,) is that of a Natchez Indian,[8-+]
obtained from a mound not far from that city by the late Mr. James
Tooley, Jr., and by him presented to me. The face in this, as in the
former instance, has all the characteristics of the native Indian; and
the cranium has undergone precisely the same process of artificial
compression, although these tribes were separated from each other by the
vast geographical distance of four thousand miles!

Could we discover the cranial remains of the older Mexican nations, we
should doubtless find many of them to possess the same fanciful type of
conformation;[8-++] for if either of the skulls figured above could be
again clothed in flesh and blood, would we not have restored to us the
very heads that are so abundantly sculptured on the monuments of Central
America, and so graphically described by Herrera, when he tells us that
the people of Yucatan _flattened their heads and foreheads_?

The following diagrams are copied, on an enlarged scale, from Mr.
Stephens's Travels,[8-Sec.] and will serve in further illustration of this
interesting subject. They are taken from bas-reliefs in the _Palace at
Palenque_. The personage fig. 4, (whose head-dress we have partly
omitted,) appears to be a king or chieftain, at whose feet are two
suppliants, naked and cross-legged, of whom we copy the one that
preserves the most perfect outli