Note 147 — THE EXCAVATED RESIDENCES

Footnote 147: (return) The ingenious author of Philosophic Researches concerning the Americans, speaking of a race which appear to resemble the Acephali of Herodotus, or the race of men having one eye, and that in their chest, says, "There is in Canibar a race of savages who have hardly any neck, and whose shoulders reach up to their ears. This monstrous appearance is artificial, and to give it to their children they put enormous weights upon their heads, so as to make the vertebræ of the neck enter, if we may so say, the channel bone, (clavicule.) These barbarians, from a distance, seem to have their mouth in the breast; and might well enough, in ignorant and enthusiastic travellers, serve to revive the fable of the Acephali, or men without heads." (See Larcher's Notes on Herodotus's Melpomene, cap. 191.)--Saint Augustin, whose veracity is scarcely to be doubted, declared in his thirty-third sermon, intituled "A ses Frères dans le Désert"--Avoir vu en Ethiopie des hommes et des femmes sans tête avec des grands yeux sur le poitrine.