from most of them and sold. During the excavations many human bones and other relics were found, but they attracted little interest, and most of them were destroyed. I learned, however, during a recent visit to the islands, that a few of the bones had found their way into the hands of thoughtful and intelligent persons, and had thus been preserved. Their custodians at once appreciated my desire to study them, and generously placed them at my service for this purpose, so that I was able to obtain notes for a pretty complete anthropological description of the Ceboynas. The wife of the governor of the colony, Mrs. Blake, a most enthusiastic and able naturalist, whose contributions to science are well known, had herself explored one of the caves—an undertaking which calls for energy and endurance quite incomprehensible to any one who has never attempted exploration in the tropics. She had found fragments of several skeletons in the cave, and she placed them all in my hands as soon as I expressed a wish to study them. Dr. J. C. Alberry, a Nassau physician, was equally generous with a female skull in perfect preservation, which he had in his office, and both he and Mrs. Blake afterward authorized me to deposit these relics of a lost and almost unknown race in one of our great anthropological collections. The Nassau Public Library contains two male skulls which the trustees kindly permitted me to draw and measure.
As the result of my examination of this material, I am now able to state that the Lucayans were large people, about equal in size and stature to the average European, and very muscular and heavy. The bones, especially those of the skulls, are very thick, firm, and heavy, with a surface almost as dense and white as ivory. After examining the skulls, it is easy to credit the statement that the steel swords of the Spaniards were often broken over the hard heads of the Lucayans. The brain was large, and the capacity of the cranium is about equal to that of an average Caucasian skull; but they had protuberant jaws and the powerful neck- and jaw-muscles of true savages, and the outlines of the skulls have none of the softness and delicacy which characterize those of more civilized and gentle races of men. The eyes were very oblique, sloping downward away from the nose, and the orbits are very large and angular. The cheek-bones are broad and high, and the jaws peculiarly massive and square.
The skulls are extremely broad in proportion to their length, and they are among the most brachycephalic, or round-headed, of all known human skulls, the greatest breadth being more than nine tenths of the greatest length.
The Ceboynas flattened their heads artificially in infancy, so that the vertical part of the forehead is completely obliterated in all the adult skulls, and the head slopes backward immediately
