ABSTRACT
An industrious Hungarian physical anthropologist, von Torok, used to take more than 5,000 measurements on each skull he studied. The great English anthropologist, Karl Pearson, devised an instrument called the cranial coordinotograph in order to be able to describe the skull in terms of certain modern geometries. He said that when he was in good practice he could deal with one skull in six hours. Small wonder that physical anthropologists have seemed to the general public and even to their scientific colleagues to be obsessed with skulls. The skull of infants is deformed into weird shapes without more damage than an occasional headache in the case of the more severe types of deformation. Noses, ears, waists, and even the sexual organs are subjected to cruel distortions. A most torturing variety of headache, migraine, seems to go not only with particular psychological and personality tendencies but also with a pattern of anatomical features of the skull and face.
