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ture softened by the climate of India, and by more mild and civilized manners.

But we must add to the effects of climate, and other physical influences in diversifying the figure of the head, the artificial means applied by several barbarian and savage nations, in order to attain some fantastic idea of beauty. Certain tribes among the American indians endeavour, by the use of particular kinds of ligature, or instruments of pressure, ap-plied to the head of the new born infants, to change its natural from, and to give it one which they es-teem more beautiful, or more martial.* And similar customs exist, according to the narrations of voyagers most worthy of credit, in many of the islands of

*Two nations among the northern tribes, are, from the shape which they give their heads, in the manner related above, distinguished by the denominations of the round-heads, and the flat-heads. This is attested also by Charlevoix in his history of Canada. Condamini, who spent a long time in South-America, informs us, in a memoir addressed to the Academy of Sciences at Paris in 1745, that the nation of the Omaguas have the fantastic custom of pressing the heads of their children, as soon as born, between two flat pieces of wood, in order to give the face the appearance of the full moon. The existence of similar customs in Lima, is further proved by a decree of the Synod or Council of that province, forbidding the indians to distort the heads of their children by putting a force upon nature -- At a Synod held in the city of Lima in the year 1585.


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the southern ocean. This practice was not unknown to several nations of antiquity both in Europe and Asia. It is attributed by Hippocrates, to the Macrocephali; a nation near the eastern end of the Euxine sea. They moulded the heads of their children, he says, to the long figure, which their name imports, because they esteemed it a mark of noble and generous birth, and sentiments. And he supposes it was originally effected by certain bandages, or other means of pressure, employed by midwives and nurses in the earliest period of infancy. It is his opinion, likewise, that the various forms of the head in many different nations may be attributed originally to similar arts; because nature, says he, may, in time, be made to assume the shape of art; so that any obliquity of form artificially given to a particular member of the body, and repeated through many generations, shall, at length, be incorporated into the constitution of the race, and become hereditary.* Whatever estimate we may frame of this principle, which certainly derives no inconsiderable weight from the name of the great father of medical science,

*Hip. de aёre, and locis, &c. Sect. 3. edit. Fresii, p. 289, de Macrocephalis.

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