398 OEIGINAL AETICLES. 



the Northern tribes." I had an opportunity last summer, through 

 the kindness of Mr. Oeorge Petrie ol" Earkwall, of examining one of 

 the Orkney twisted skulls. Mr. Petrie, who has paid great attention 

 to Archaeology, was perfectly acquainted with the phenomenon. He 

 kindly furnished me with a photograph of a well-marked example, 

 and informed me that he had met with many skulls in the cists and 

 barrows of Orkney, showing the same form of obliquity. The present 

 short notice is meant merely to direct more general attention to this 

 curious subject, and to indicate certain conclusions which appear to 

 be applicable at all events to one great group of cases. "Whatever 

 explanation we may accept, so uniform a result clearly points to an 

 equally uniform cause. As ah-eady indicated, my own observations 

 have led me to conclude with Professor Owen, Dr. Johnson of Shrews- 

 bury, and others who have had an opportunity of examining good 

 specimens, such as the Wroxeter twisted skvills, that the distortions 

 are due to what has been termed by Professor Owen, " tomb pres- 

 sure," a cause of posthumous change, which was, I believe, first sug- 

 gested in a definite form by Dr. Thurnam, and whose importance 

 in certain cases is fully admitted by Mr. Davis in the work already 

 cited. Before entering more fully into this question, I shall briefly 

 describe three skiills, selected because they have been procured fi'om 

 distant localities in England, Scotland, and Ireland, and are to be 

 referred in all probability to widely diflferent periods and tribes ; and 

 because the distortion in all three cases, though highly characteristic, 

 is slight, and slight distortions only can give rise to any serious mis- 

 conception as to their cause. 



During the recent explorations at Wroxeter, a number of skeletons 

 were disinterred in a piece of ground called the Orchard, witliin the 

 walls of the Eoman city of Uriconium. The skeletons had evidently 

 been buried. They were however simply imbedded, without any 

 appearance of protection, in soil richly impregnated with vegetable 

 matter. Although there is no tradition of the place where they were 

 found ever having been used as a graveyard, I am by no means sa- 

 tisfied with the evidence which refers these skeletons to the Eoman 

 Seriod. The dead were rarely, if ever, interred within the walls of 

 toman towns, and the true cemetery, containing abundance of cine- 

 rary urns, with bm'nt bones, has been discovered in its usual site, 

 outside the walls of Uriconium. Among a rude people, a certain 

 reverence always attaches to ruins, and it is by no means impossible 

 that this site was chosen for the burial of their dead, after the des- 

 truction of the Eoman city, by some British tribe. Of nineteen 

 skulls found in the Orchard, twehe were more or less distorted, and 

 the character of the distortion was so uniibrm that it was the general 

 impression that the remains were those of a race afilicted with some 

 peculiar congenital malfoi-matiou, or of an aboriginal tribe, slaves 

 possibly to the Eomans, and whose fashion it was to squeeze the heads 

 of their infants, after the manner of the Caribs and Platheads, only to 

 t]ie production of au iiiliiiitcly more grotesque deformity. 



