It is interesting to note in passing that certain racial distinctions did not escape the eye of Vesalius. “It appears,” he remarks, “that most nations have something peculiar in the shape of the head. The crania of the Genoese, and, still more remarkable, those of the Greeks and Turks, are globular in form. This shape, which they esteem elegant and well adapted to their practice of enveloping the head in the folds of their turbans, is often produced by the midwives at the solicitation of the mother.” He further observes “that the Germans had generally a flattened occiput and broad head, because the children are always laid on their backs in the cradles; and that the Belgians have a more oblong form, because the children are allowed to sleep on their sides.” We know that more or less continuous pressure is exerted on the pliable heads of infants to produce admired shapes, but the theory was carried rather too far when adduced, some centuries later, to account for the facial features of negroes. Lawrence, in his _Lectures on Comparative Anatomy_, attributed the flat noses and thick lips of the negro to the method of carrying babies in Africa. The negro mothers, while at work, carry their infants on their backs, and “in the violent motions required for their hard labour, as in beating or pounding millet, the face of the child is said to be constantly thumping against the back of the mother.” By this rude treatment the face of the negro child was supposed to be moulded into shape; but, as Cunningham points out, no attempt was made to explain how the process of bumping produced exactly opposite results in the case of the nose and lips—reducing the prominence of the former and increasing the projection of the latter. [Sidenote: =Spigel.=] “The invention of the ‘lineæ cephalometricæ’ of Spigel, who died in the early part of the seventeenth century, may perhaps be regarded as constituting the earliest scientific attempt at cranial measurement.” He drew four lines in certain directions, and a skull in which these lines were equal to each other he regarded as regularly proportioned. “Although these lines are evidently not sufficient for the comparative ethnography of the present day, yet it is interesting to observe that, in ascending the zoological scale, these lines approximate equality just in proportion as the head measured approaches the human form.”[11] Footnote 11: J. Aitken Meigs, _North American Med.-Chir. Rev._, 1861, p. 840. [Sidenote: =Tyson.=]