52 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



those of the preceding Bronze age. We can thus trace back the 

 present European peoples to Neolithic times. 



We find evidence on all sides of the presence of these three 

 peoples in Europe in the Neolithic period, which, our archaelogical 

 evidence seems to say, had its beginning about ten thousand years 

 ago. Now what are the characteristics of these three pre-historic 

 peoples and how are they distinguished one from the other? How 

 can we be sure we are dealing with three different races, the pre- 

 decessors of the present races of Europe? The evidence is indis- 

 putable. It presents itself under divers aspects, but chiefîy we 

 gather it from a comparison of their skull forms. 



In seeking to establish a physical test of race, students of man, 

 have proposed several criteria. Some of the earlier students, like 

 Huxley and Virchow, regarded the color of the eyes and the hair as a 

 reliable test. Today, however, the concensus of opinion favors the 

 making of cranial characters the chief criterion of race; and of these 

 experience has taught us that the most persistent and least variable 

 is that expressed by the cephalic index; that is, the relation of the 

 width to the length of the head. Retzius, who was the first to employ 

 this method, recognized but two fundamental head forms, the long 

 oval one which he termed the dolichocephalic and the short round one 

 which he called the brachycephalic. Modern anthropometry, 

 however, recognizes a third or intermediate one termed the meso- 

 cephalic. This form would appear to be the result of a blending or 

 intermixture of the other two fundamental forms; for whenever 

 there is an intermixture of the two extreme types the result seems to 

 be not the development of a third type, with fixed ratios, but rather a 

 form that tends to approximate to one or other of the parent types. 

 That is to say, the skull-forms resulting from such intermixture of 

 racial characters reveal a tendency to group themselves round one 

 or other of Retzius' two type forms rather than to develop a definitely 

 intermediate form. Notwithstanding this observed fact we find 

 mesocephaly is the characteristic of certain well-defined racial groups 

 of which the British, the Chinese and the Polynesians are noted 

 examples. From which it would appear that a more or less permanent 

 intermediate type has been evolved by the crossing of the two extreme 

 types. That this crossing has taken place in the case of the British 

 peoples we know for certain. We now, therefore, recognise three 

 types of skull-form and apply them in the classification of the races 

 of men. All skulls having a cephalic index below seventy-five per 

 cent., that is, any whose breadth is less than seventy-five per cent, 

 of their length, are termed dolichocephalic skulls. Those whose 



