DR. J. TIIUEN'AM ON" SYJfOSTOSIS OP THE CRA]^IAL BONES. 253 



tliey belong."* lu the very nature of tilings, however, it may be 

 remarked that such cases must be exceptional. To suppose that 

 entire families or even tribes may be the subject of an abnormal ten- 

 dency to ossification of the sutures, by v^hich the natural form of 

 the skull becomes changed, it may be from a brachycephalous to an 

 elongate type, ajDpears contrary to probability.f The largest collec- 

 tion of dolichocephalous British skulls is, I believe, that in my 

 possession, having been procured by myself and friends from cham- 

 bered and other long barrov^s in the counties of AVilts and 

 Gloucester. After a minute examination and comparison of more than 

 fifty of such skulls and calvaria, I am unable, except in the few 

 evidently abnormal cases described and referred to in this paper, to 

 infer any connexion between the situation and extent of efl'ace- 

 ment of the sutures and the particular forms which the skuU.j 

 present. In some the median-longitudinal, in others the transverse 

 sutures, are those principally obliterated ; in all however the form is 

 more or less dolichocephalous. The long form of skull and the prema- 

 ture obliteration of the sutures, thus appear to be coincident pheno- 

 mena, not standing to each other in the relation of cause and effect, 

 though they are probably both of them characteristic of the race. 



Let us now examine the evidence as to the tendency to oblitera- 

 tion of the sutures, and especially to synostosis of the parietals in 

 the dolichocephalous Britons of the Long Barrows, which forms one 

 distinction between them and the brachycephalous Britons of the 

 later Round Barrows. No case of true scaphocephalus has come 

 to light ; but out of from one hundred to one hundred and twenty 

 skulls and calvaria of this class which are known to me, there are 

 tw^o well-marked examples of the sub-scaphocephalic variety of 

 synostosis, both of which have some tendency to the klinocephalic 

 form. 



In the Bateman collection, the skull 89 t. is that of a young man 

 from a galleried tumulus at Five Wells Hill, near Taddington, Derby- 



* On Cranial Deformities, and more especially on the Scaphocephalic Skiill. 

 By W. Tnmer, M.B. — Natural History lievieiv, Jan. 1864, Vol. iv. p. 105. 



f Something- like this is seen when the very rare case occm-s of scaphocephalus 

 in a skull of brachycephalous race-form. An instance of this is met with in the re- 

 markable skull of a Lapp (No. 1146, and No. II. 15, in the Table appended hereto), 

 in which a scaphoid bi-parietal is combined with normally brachycephalous 

 characters. 



