DATIS 0:S THE CRANIA OF THE ANCIENT BRITONS. 293 



equally satisfactory proofs that this occipital flatness was a charac- 

 teristic of the skulls of ancient Gauls. It exists in many contained 

 in the Gralerie Authropologique, at the Jardin des Plantes, and is 

 quite obvious in some of those derived from the excavation of the 

 dolmen at Meudon, near Paris. A cast of one of these crania in 

 my possession, is perhaps the most marked example of parieto- 

 occijiital flatness I have seen, and at the same time it indicates most 

 convincingly the artificial nature of the distortion. (Fig. 2.) This 

 also is the skull of a man, and is remarkably short. The flattened 

 sui'face is nearly four inches in diameter in each direction, and rises 

 up from just above the tuberosity of the occiput almost perpendicu- 

 larly. At the junction of the sagittal with the lambdoidal suture 

 there is a slight depression. The flattening is not quite symmetrical, 

 but rather greater on the right side. In this example the plane of 

 the flatness is, as nearly as possible, parallel to that of the vertical 

 line of the calvarium, or the line drawn through the centre of the 

 ear and the point of juncture of the coronal sutiu-e with the 

 sagittal.* I have observed this peculiar flatness in many skulls of 

 very young subjects, an evidence that it is produced at an early 

 period of life.f 



In turning to the cause of so general a deviation of form, it 

 becomes at once evident that it must have arisen from the operation 

 of influences which were all but universal. They must have been 

 set in action at the earliest period of infantile life, and upon both 

 sexes ; yet there is no evidence that they were used with any 

 express design for the production of this deformation. They clearly 

 resolve themselves into the particular mode of niu-sing infants 

 employed by the women of the ancient Britons, Caledonians, Hiber- 



* It ought not to be omitted to be mentioned here, that the latg learned and 

 excellent Swedish craniologist, Professor A. A. Retzius, designated this and the 

 other brachycephahc skulls derived from the Meudon dolmen, " Basque." Arndt, 

 Bask, Rudolf Keyser, Nilsson. and others had argued in an erudite manner, that 

 all Western Europe in the oldest period was inhabited by a so-called Turanian 

 race, who had brachycepluxlic skulls, of which the Finns and the Basques are the 

 only representatives. On the discovery of many crania of this form among the 

 osseous relics of the dolmen, at Meudon, the ardent Retzius regarded this, which 

 is a mere hypothesis, to be fully proved, and he subsequently treated it as an estab- 

 lished fact, and boldly asserted that these were the skulls of Basques, i. e. of the 

 primeval race now supposed to be represented by the Basques. See his " Blick pa 

 Ethnologiens niirvarande Standpunkt," 1857, p. 8. Wc may respect the iervid 

 affirmation of so amiable a man, but are not able to allow that these crania are 

 anything more than those of ancient Gauls, of the tribe of the Parish. Such 

 conclusion is not favourable to this large hypothesis, but it is believed to be iu con- 

 formity with the facts and sober philosophy. 



■f It should likcAvise be particularly noticed that the parieto-occipital flatness is 

 seen to occm- in crania from Cists, where they were defended from superincumbent 

 pressure, as well as in those from Barrows. This is a convincing evidence that it is a 

 deformation of a totally different kind from posthumous distortion, which owes its ori- 

 gin to compression after burial. See Cran. Brit. p. 37. Atheniemn, Aug. 6, 1859. 



