Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 3 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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Man when just issued from the woods and
supposed to be so simple in his manners, is far from being tractable
in his ideas of beauty and propriety.
I observed, however, with
surprise, that the manner in which these poor children are bound, and
which seems to obstruct the circulation of the blood, does not operate
injuriously on their muscular movements. There is no race of men more
robust and swifter in running than the Caribs.
If the women labour to form the legs and thighs of their children so
as to produce what painters call undulating outlines, they abstain (at
least in the Llanos), from flattening the head by compressing it
between cushions and planks from the most tender age. This practice,
so common heretofore in the islands and among several tribes of the
Caribs of Parima and French Guiana, is not observed in the missions
which we visited. The men there have foreheads rounder than those of
the Chaymas, the Otomacs, the Macos, the Maravitans and most of the
inhabitants of the Orinoco. A systematizer would say that the form is
such as their intellectual faculties require. We were so much the more
struck by this fact as some of the skulls of Caribs engraved in
Europe, for works on anatomy, are distinguished from all other human
skulls by the extremely depressed forehead and acute facial angle. In
some osteological collections skulls supposed to be those of Caribs of
the island of St. Vincent are in fact skulls shaped by having been
pressed between planks.
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