That the intellectual powers are to a large extent independent of the
particular conformation of the skull is shown further by the
circumstance that so many savage tribes have for centuries followed the
fashion of artificially shaping their heads, without any apparent effect
on their minds. Man’s brain incites him, as Topinard remarks, “to the
noblest deeds, as well as to the most ridiculous practices, such as
cutting off the little finger, scorching the soles of the feet,
extracting the front teeth, or deforming the head _because others have
done so before him_.” But of all silly Fashions hostile to Beauty, that
of deforming the head has found the largest number of followers—always
excepting, of course, the modern Wasp-Waist Mania.
Deformed skulls have been found in the Caucasus, the Crimea, Hungary,
Silesia, France, Belgium, Switzerland, in Polynesia, in different parts
of Asia, etc. “But the classic country in which these deformations are
found is America,” says Topinard. “M. Gosse has described sixteen
species of artificial deformation, ten of which were in American
skulls.” “Sometimes the infant was fastened on a plank or a sort of
cradle with leather straps; or they applied pieces of clay, pressing
them down with small boards on the forehead, the vertex, and the
occiput.... Sometimes the head was kneaded with the hands or knees, or,
the infant being laid on the back, the elbow was pressed on the
forehead. Circular bands were sometimes employed to support the sides of
the head.”
“Many American Indians,” says Darwin, “are known to admire a head so
extremely flattened as to appear to us idiotic. The natives of the
north-western coast compress the head into a pointed cone;” while the
inhabitants of Arakhan “admire a broad, smooth forehead, and in order to
produce it, they fasten a plate of lead on the head of the new-born
children.”
“The genuine Turkish skull is of the broad Tartar form,” says Mr. Tylor,
“while the nations of Greece and Asia Minor have oval skulls, which
gives the reason why at Constantinople it became the fashion to mould
the babies’ skulls round, so that they grew up with the broad head of
the conquering race. Relics of such barbarism linger on in the midst of
civilisation, and not long ago a French physician surprised the world by
the fact that nurses in Normandy were still giving the children’s heads
a sugar-loaf shape by bandages and a tight cap, while in Brittany they
preferred to press it round. No doubt they are doing so to this day.”
“Failure properly to mould the cranium of her offspring,” says Bancroft,
“gives to the Chinook matron the reputation of a lazy and undutiful
mother, and subjects the neglected children to the ridicule of their
young companions, _so despotic is fashion_.”
Food for thought will also be found in these remarks by Darwin.
Ethnologists believe, he says, “that the skull is modified by the kind
of cradle in which infants sleep;” and Schaffhausen is convinced that
“in certain trades, such as that of a shoemaker, where the head is
habitually held forward, the forehead becomes more round and prominent.”
If this is true, then we have one reason, at least, why authors have
such large foreheads.