Scott. — Osteology of the Maori and Moriori. 25 



Moriori skeleton in the Colonial Museum, Wellington ; and a 

 few crania are, I believe, in the Godeffroy Museum at 

 Hamburg. 



I describe in this paper fifty skulls from the Chatham 

 Islands. Thirty-four of these are adult or aged males ; seven 

 are adult females. In three other adult skulls the sexual 

 characters are very ill-defined, and I class them as of doubtful 

 sex. Six are the skulls of youths or children. 



Twenty-eight of these skulls are in the anatomical museum 

 of the University of Otago ; seventeen are in the Canterbury 

 Museum ; five are in the Colonial Museum at Wellington. 



Though all fifty were, I believe, found at the Chathams, I 

 do not regard them all as Moriori skulls. From what has 

 been said above it is clear that Chatham Island skulls are not 

 necessarily those of the Moriori aborigines. They may be so ; 

 but they may also be Maori, or even European ; and in my 

 collection it is easy to recognise different types of skull, and, 

 though none of them are European, I have come to the con- 

 clusion that four skulls are Maori rather than Moriori. These 

 differ from the others in several respects, but especially in the 

 form of the cranial vault, and resemble more closely some of 

 the skulls found in New Zealand, near the western opening of 

 Cook Strait — that part of the North Island where the Nga- 

 tiawa and other invaders of 1835 lived before their exodus to 

 the Chathams. 



The other forty-six skulls are, in my opinion, Moriori, but 

 not all of one type. Amongst the adult skulls two types may 

 be recognised, and the skulls may be divided into groups 

 according to their resemblance to one or other — groups, how- 

 ever, which shade into each other through intermediate forms. 

 The typical members of the first group are usually large and 

 rather heavy skulls, with prominent parietal eminences and 

 roof-like vertices. They are all more or less pentagonal as 

 seen from behind, some very markedly so, and the low^ flattened 

 retreating frontal region is a most striking feature. The excess 

 of width over height is generally well marked ; indeed, in the 

 most typical members of the group the brain-case is distinctly 

 flattened. The orbits are, as a rule, high, and the appearance 

 of height is increased by the form of the superciliary ridges ; 

 while the nasal opening is narrow, with long prominent nasal 

 bones, which are convex below. The air-sinuses in the frontal 

 bone are mainly confined to the region above the root of the 

 nose, so that, while there is, as a rule, a massive prominent 

 glabella, the superciliary ridges are short, and do not [pass 

 far out over the orbits. The majority of the skulls from 

 the Chatham Islands that I have examined are of this 

 type. The skull numbered 27, in Table III., shows a 

 different type, and several others resemble it more or less 



