“These cause the teeth to be equal, those file them to points, giving them the shape of a saw.”

This difference appears to have held on till the present; at least no skull of an Indio is known to me with similar deformation of the teeth.  This custom of the Negritos is so much more remarkable since the chipping of the corners of the teeth is widely spread among the African blacks.

[Skill flattening.] The other part of the body used most for deformation—­the skull—­is in strong contrast to the last-named custom.  Deformed crania; especially from older times, are quite numerous in the Philippines; probably they belong exclusively to the Indios.  If they exist among the Negritos, I do not know it; the only exception comes from the Tinguianes, of whom I. de los Reyes reports their skulls are flattened behind (por detras oprimido).  Such flattening is found, however, not seldom among tribes who have the practice of binding children on hard cradle boards—­chiefly among those families who keep their infants a long time on such contrivances.  A sure mark by which to discriminate accidental pressure of this sort from one intentionally produced is not at hand; it may be that in accidental deformation oblique position of the deformed spot is more frequent; at any rate, the difference in the Philippines is a very striking one, since there not so much the occiput as the front and middle portions suffer from the disfigurements, and thereby deformations are produced that have had their most perfect expression among the ancient Peruvians and other American tribes.

I have discussed cranial deformation of the Americans in greater detail, where I exhibit the accidental and the artificial (intentional) deformation in their principal forms.  The result is that in large sections of America scarcely any ancient skulls are found having their natural forms, but that the practice of deformation has not been general; moreover, a number of deformation centers may be differentiated which stand in no direct association with one another.  The Peruvian center is far removed from that of the northwest coast, and this again from that of the Gulf States.  From this it must not be said that each center may have had its own, as it were, autochthonous origin.  But the method has not so spread that its course can be followed immediately.  Rather is the supposition confirmed that the method is to be traced to some other time, therefore that somewhere there must have been a place of origin for it.  On the Eastern Hemisphere, and especially in the region here under consideration, the relations are apparently otherwise.  Here exist, so far as known, great areas entirely free from deformation; small ones, on the other hand, full of it.  There are here, also, deformation centers, but only a few.  Among these, with our present knowledge, the Philippines occupy the first place.