In referring to the methods by which artificial compression was brought about in America, Prof. Wilson remarks: “Trifling as it may appear, it is not without interest to have the fact brought under our notice by the disclosures of ancient barrows and cysts, that the same practice of nursing the child and carrying it about, bound to a flat cradle-board, prevailed in Britain and the North of Europe long before the first notices of written history reveal the presence of man beyond the Baltic or the English Channel, and that in all probability the same custom prevailed continuously from the shores of the German Ocean to Behring Straits.”[257] Dr. L. A. Gosse testifies to the prevalence of the same custom among the Caledonians and Scandinavians of the earliest times,[258] and Dr. Thurman has treated the same peculiarity of the early Anglo-Saxon.[259] It is a matter of no little surprise to the inquirer in this field to learn that this system of skull distortion introduced into Southern Europe by the Asiatic hordes which overran it in the fifth century has been perpetuated, though somewhat modified, and at present is in vogue in the south of France.[260] The distinguished Dr. Foville, in charge of the Asylum for Insane in the Department Seine-Inférieure and Charenton, has figured this process in his work on the _Anatomy of the Nervous System_, as well as a number of skulls which have striking Peruvian resemblances. The artificial form in this case is produced by the use of peculiar head-dresses or bandages.[261] The Egyptians placed a pillow under the neck and not for the head; hence the elongated crania characteristic of the race, and it is not a little remarkable that the Feejee Islanders have the same custom at the present day. The Kankas of the Sandwich Islands produce the flattened occiput by supporting the infant’s head always in the palm of the hand.[262] The South Sea Islanders have a flattened occiput, as Pickering describes it, projecting but slightly beyond the line of the neck.[263] Prof. Wilson comments upon this fact as follows: “Traces of purposed deformation of the head among the islanders of the Pacific, have an additional interest in their relation to one possible source of the South American population by Oceanic migration, suggested by philological and other independent evidence. But for our present purpose the peculiar value of these modified skulls lies in the disclosures of influences operating alike undesignedly, and with a well-defined purpose, in producing the very same cranial conformation among races occupying the British Islands in ages long anterior to earliest history, and among the savage tribes of America and the simple islanders of the Pacific in the present day.”[264] It is a well-known fact that flattening the skull has prevailed from the earliest times in most parts of the American Continent, especially on the Pacific coast. From the extreme north to Southern Peru, flattening