DR. J. THUEIfAM ON SYNOSTOSIS Or THE CEANIAL EONES. 259 



Agreeing to this, is the nodulated and rugose character of the upper 

 halves of the frontal and two parietals, the latter of which espe- 

 cially are studded with fine perforations. The right parietal foramen 

 is alone present. As in extreme age, the entire calvarium is con- 

 verted into a solid box of the hardness of ivory, the whiteness of 

 which is simulated by that of its internal surface. 



Another dolichocephalic British skull from the chambered barrow 

 at Eodmarton, Gloucestershire, lithographed and described in the 

 Crania Britannica (PI. XXYII, 59),* is that of a man of about 

 50 years of age. The proportion of the breath to the length is '72. 

 " Externally, the great sutures are tolerably distinct, though, with 

 the exception of the squamous, they appear to be obliterated inter- 

 nally. Of the fronto-sphenoid, the lower parts of the coronal, and 

 the left occipito-mastoid there is scarcely a trace within or without." 

 Here, the ossification of the sutures is very general ; the transverse 

 the median, and lateral-longitudinal, are all aflected by it ; so that the 

 dolichocephalism can hardly be conceived as being produced by the 

 synostosis. In this skull the obliteration is doubtless of the prema- 

 turely senile description ; but though the cranium of a man more 

 advanced in life than that from Winterbourn Stoke, it is instructive 

 to observe that the obliteration is less advanced than in that more 

 youthful specimen. 



In a recent paper by Dr. J. Barnard Davis, the doctrine of synos- 

 tosis appears to me to be carried beyond its just limits, w^ith a view of 

 explaining the peculiarities of the now-celebrated Neanderthal skull. 

 That it is synostotic is not to be doubted, though how far its pecu- 

 liariftes have been produced by the obliteration of the sutures 

 appears doubtful. However this may be, there is one passage in Dr. 

 Davis's paper on which I desire to make a few observations. " In 

 cases," says Dr. Davis, " in which the sagittal suture is not closed, the 

 obliteration of the spheno-frontal, -parietal and -squamosal sutures, 

 which often carries that of the sides of the coronal with it, I am 

 satisfied, gives rise to an elongation of the calvarium. * * * * 

 This ossification has a material influence (sometimes with that of the 



• This skull has been presented to the cranial collection of Dr. J. Barnard 

 Davis, in which it is No. 1210. A second skull from the same chamber of very 

 similar form, and with the sutures almost equally obliterated is figured in the Memoirs 

 of the Anthropological Society of London,[|vol. i. p. 153, figs. 12, 13. 



