THE STUDY OF MAN. 3 i 5 



the tongues of the Australians which I have examined than in the 

 tongues of ordinary Europeans. 



There is a wide field open to the anatomical anthropologist in 

 this investigation of the physical basis of dialect. It is one which 

 requires minute and careful work, but it will repay any student 

 who can obtain the material, and who takes time and opportunity 

 to follow it out. The anatomical side of phonology is yet an im- 

 perfectly known subject, if one may judge by the crudeness of the 

 descriptions of the mechanism of the several sounds to be found 

 even in the most recent text-books. As a preliminary step in this 

 direction we are in urgent need of an appropriate nomenclature 

 and an accurate description of the muscular fibers of the tongue. 

 The importance of such a work can be estimated when we remem- 

 ber that there is not one of the 260 possible consonantal sounds 

 known to the phonologist which is not capable of expression in 

 terms of lingual, labial, and palatine musculature. 



The acquisition of articulate speech became possible to man 

 only when his alveolar arch and palatine area became shortened 

 and widened, and when his tongue, by its accommodation to the 

 modified mouth, became shorter and more horizontally flattened, 

 and the higher refinements of pronunciation depend for their pro- 

 duction upon more extensive modifications in the same directions. 



I can only allude now very briefly to the effects of the third 

 set of factors, the sizes of the sense organs, on the conformation 

 of the skull. We have already noted that the shape and the size 

 of the orbital opening depend on the jaw as much as on the eye. 

 A careful set of measurements has convinced me that the relative 

 or absolute capacity of the orbital cavity is of very little signifi- 

 cance as a characteristic of race. The microseme Australian orbit 

 and the megaseme Kanaka are practically of the same capacity, 

 and the eyeballs of the two Australians that I have had the op- 

 portunity of examining are a little larger than those of the aver- 

 age of mesoseme Englishmen. 



The nasal fossae are more variable in size than the orbits, but 

 the superficial area of their lining and their capacity are harder 

 to measure, and bear no constant proportion to the size of their 

 apertures, because it is impossible without destroying the skull to 

 shut off the large air sinuses from the nasal fossae proper for pur- 

 poses of measurement. Thus the most leptorhine of races, the 

 Eskimo, with an average nasal index of 437, has a nasal capacity 

 of 55 c. c, equal to that of the platyrhine Australian, whose aver- 

 age is 54'5, and both exceed the capacity of the leptorhine English, 

 which average about 50 c. c. There is an intimate and easily 

 proved connection between dental size and the extent of 'the nasal 

 floor and of the pyriform aperture. 



These are but a few of the points which a scientific craniometry 



