15 



corpses had obviously been wrapped in a blanket, put into a coffin, 

 and deposited in the ground. As we found them the lids of the coffins 

 had fallen in, and the blanket, soft parts of the body, and the bones 

 themselves, had become firmly matted together by the ingrowth of 

 bracken or fern root ; this process had gone on to such an extent that 

 it was necessary, in some instances, actually to lever up the skeleton 

 from its coffin bed. On removal from the coffin the crania were found 

 to be thickly encrusted with a mass of decayed blanket and vegetable 

 mould, sometimes to the depth of 5 to 7 cm. We transported these 

 nine crania to Melbourne in the condition in which we found them, 

 and on removing the encrusting vegetable mould all the skulls, with 

 one exception, were found to be in perfect preservation. The ex- 

 ceptional one had suffered in a somewhat remarkable way; probably 

 from the presence of an acid in the water permeating the soil in 

 which the remains were interred all the salts had been dissolved out 

 of the bone, leaving only the organic matter, and consequently the 

 bone had become perfectly soft. This in itself would not have mattered 

 much, but unfortunately the softened skull had obviously been sub- 

 jected to pressure, and had become distorted, and thus rendered useless 

 for scientific purposes. One or two other crania had been similarly 

 softened but not distorted. On examining the distorted skull in Mel- 

 bourne it was clear that the specimen was useless for any cranio- 

 raetrical purpose, but its loss from our series does not affect the ulti- 

 mate number of the discovery, for we have since found in the National 

 Museum, Melbourne, two more undescribed Tasmania crania, one of 

 which is undoubtedly a genuine example, the other we are not so con- 

 fident of, and in the meanwhile we have decided to exclude it from 

 the series. 



Pending the settlement of the question as to where these relics 

 of Palaeolithic Man's sojourn in Tasmania are to be ultimately housed, 

 our problem has been now to leave them, in the meantime, in the 

 hands of their lawful owners, and at the same time make them avail- 

 able for scientific study in all parts of the world. 



This problem we have partially solved by taking accurate tracings 

 of every skull in four normae, verticalis, lateralis, faciaHs, and occip- 

 italis, by means of Martin's Dioptrograph. We have therefore re- 

 corded some 212 tracings of Tasmanian crania, 168 of which comprise 

 absolutely fresh and unrecorded material. 



We were not, unfortunately, able to record the horizontal, coronal 

 and other curves introduced by the Sarasins (7) in their investigation 

 on the Veddah, and more recently adopted with so much success by 



