Note 21 — Chapter VI · Industry, Commerce, and Social Organization; Fights, Wounds and Trepanation.

In the New as in the Old World man survived many of these horrible wounds, and a skull found under a mound near Devil’s River shows a serious wound inflicted many years before death, and one of the Peruvian crania in the Peabody Museum bears a long frontal fracture, doubtless produced by the violent blow of a club; the five or six fragments still to be made out are, so to speak, solidified, and the wounded man had evidently lived on for many years, thanks apparently to his good constitution alone, for there are no signs of the performing of any surgical operation, such as the removal of the splinters of bone, for instance.21