5i6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



thai and Spy type.* The fact that this resemblance exists is of none 

 the less importance because the proper interpretation of it is not 

 yet clear. It may be taken to be a pretty sure indication of the 

 physiological continuity of the blond long-heads with the Pleisto- 

 cene Neanderthaloid men. But this continuity may have been 

 brought about in two ways. The blond long-heads may exhibit 

 one of the lines of evolution of the men of the Neanderthaloid 

 type. Or, the Frisians may be the result of the admixture of the 

 blond long-heads with Neanderthaloid men, whose remains have 

 been found at Canstatt and at Gibraltar, as well as at Spy and in 

 the valley of the Neander ; and who therefore seem, at one time, to 

 have occupied a considerable area in western Europe. The same 

 alternatives present themselves when Neanderthaloid characters 

 appear in skulls of other races. If these characters belong to a 

 stage in the development of the human species, antecedent to the 

 differentiation of any of the existing races, we may expect to find 

 them in the lowest of these races, all over the world, and in the 

 early stages of all races. I have already referred to the remark- 

 able similarity of the skulls of certain tribes of native Australians 

 to the Neanderthal skull ; and I may add that the wide differences 

 in height between the skulls of different tribes of Australians 

 afford a parallel to the differences in altitude between the skulls 

 of the men of Spy and those of the grave-rows of north Germany. 

 Neanderthaloid features are to be met with, not only in ancient 

 long skulls ; those of the ancient broad-headed people entombed at 

 Borreby in Denmark have been often noted. 



Reckoned by centuries, the remoteness of the Quaternary or 

 Pleistocene age from our own is immense, and it is difficult to 

 form an adequate notion of its duration. Undoubtedly there is 

 an abysmal difference between the Neandert haloid race and the 

 comely living specimens of the blond long-heads with whom we 

 are familiar, But the abyss of time between the period at which 

 north Europe was first covered with ice, when savages pursued 

 mammoths and scratched their portraits with sharp stones in cen- 

 tral France, and the present day, ever widens as we learn more 

 about the events which bridge it. And, if the differences between 

 the Neanderthaloid men and ourselves could be divided into as 

 many parts as that time contains centuries, the progress from part 

 to part would probably be almost imperceptible. Nineteenth 

 Century. 



[Concluded. ] 



* Virchow, Beitrage zur physischen Anthropologic der Deutschen (Abh. der Koniglichen 

 Akademie der Wissenscbaften zu Berlin, 1876). See particularly p. 238 for the full recog- 

 nition of the Neanderthaloid characters of Frisian skulls and of the ethnological signifi- 

 cance of the similarity. 



