The President’s Address. 17 
in them, on Tuesday. On this account I do not propose to describe 
the villages now, but merely to mention the main anthropological 
results which have a bearing on the subject of this address. They 
are satisfactorily proved by the coins and all the contents to be of 
Roman age, but of British construction. Contrary to all expectation 
it was found that they were in the habit of burying their dead in 
their villlages in pits which had been previously made for other 
purposes, such as store houses or refuse pits, and of these pits one 
hundred and ninety-one have been dug out in the two villages. 
Twenty-eight skeletons were found in positions to prove that 
they were those of the inhabitants of the two villages. By a 
calculation from all the long bones it has been found that their 
average stature for the males was 5ft, 2in., and for the females 
4ft. 10in. This unexpected result shows that they were a remarkably 
short race, shorter by 3in. than the short people of the long barrows, 
whose average height, as already mentioned, was 5ft. 5in. The 
average cephalic or breadth index, for the males and females to- 
gether, was found to be 74, which, by a comparison with the 71 of 
the long barrows, and the 81 of the round barrows, shows that in 
head-form, no Jess than in stature, they approached the long barrow 
people more closely than those of the round barrows, and the bodies 
being mostly crouched up near the tops of the pits showed that 
they had retained their ancient form of burial although the extended 
bodies of a few of them implies a partial introduction of more recent 
customs. The tibiz of some of these skeletons were also decidedly 
platyenemic or flat-boned, more so than those of any existing 
European race, which is an additional link of connection with the 
earliest inhabitants of this country. But whilst the breadth index 
of the heads stands intermediate between that of the long and 
round barrow people, one or two of the skulls were markedly 
brachycephalic or round-headed, reaching to 82, whilst one or two 
others were hyperdolichocephalic or markedly long-headed, reaching 
to 68, which exceptional extremes, according to the laws of heredity, 
are precisely what we should expect on the supposition of a mixture 
of two races. We may, therefore, assume as a working hypothesis, 
until some more reasonable theory is devised, that these people were 
VOL, XXIV.—NO, LXX, Cc 
