1862.] on Fossil Remains of Man. 421 



distribution, which may be broadly expressed by drawing a line upon 

 a map of the world from Russian Tartary to the Gulf of Guinea, 

 and by regarding the two ends of that line as ethnological poles, while 

 another line, drawn at right angles to it, from Western Europe to 

 Hindostan, may be called the ethnological equator. 



At the north-eastern pole are situated the people with the most 

 eminently brachycephalic and orthognathous skulls ; at the south- 

 western pole, those people who have the most eminently dolichocephalic 

 and prognathous skulls; while along the ethnological equator the 

 races of men are, for the most part, oval-headed, or, if dolichocephalic, 

 they are orthognathous. Passing from the ethnological poles, in either 

 direction, there is a tendency to the softening down of the extreme 

 types of skull. Turning from this general view of cranial modifica- 

 tion, which was expressly stated to be open to many exceptions in 

 detail, the question was next raised whetlier the distribution of cranial 

 forms had been the same in all periods of the world's history, or 

 whether the older races, in any locality, possessed a different cranial 

 character from their successors. 



No evidence of the existence of such older and different races has 

 yet been obtained from Northern Asia, from Africa beyond tl»e shores 

 of the Mediterranean, or from Australia ; it may be that the Alfourons 

 and the mound-builders of the Mississippi valley are to be regarded 

 as ancient stocks which preceded modern immigration ; but definite 

 evidence is wantinj^: with regard to these and similar cases. In North- 

 ern and Western Europe, however, there is little doubt that several 

 races, different in cranial conformation and in civilization, have suc- 

 ceeded one another. Below and beyond the traces of Roman civiliza- 

 tion, archaeologists find evidence, first, of people who used iron, then 

 of those who employed bronze, and then of those Avho were acquainted 

 only with stone and flint (or bone) weapons and implements. How 

 far these various weapons may have been used at different epochs by 

 the same people, is a question yet to be decided ; but that in some 

 parts of Europe, at any rate, they characterize people of different cra- 

 nial structure, appears to be tolerably well made out. 



The remarkable crania from tumuli of the stone period at Borreby, 

 in Denmark, figured by Mr. Busk, were cited as authentic examples 

 of the skulls of people of the epoch in which stone axes ground to an 

 edge were the chief weapons. 



The evidence of the antiquity of these people afforded by the peat 

 bogs of Denmark, and the probability of their contemporaneity with 

 the makers of the " refuse-heaps " of Denmark, and of the pile-works 

 of Switzerland, were next considered. Ancient as the Borreby race 

 may be, they peopled Denmark subsequently to its assumption of its 

 present physical geography, and since its only great quadrupeds were 

 the urus, the bison, and deer. 



The Engis skull, on the other hand, is of a date antecedent to the 

 last great physical changes of Europe, and its owner was a contemporary 

 of the mammoth, the tichorine rhinoceros, the cave bear, and the cave 



