1864. | Turnun on the Fossil Skull Controversy. 255 
tracting from it, is illustrated by the different appearance it presents in 
the figures of this cranium given by Sir C. Lyell and Mr. Huxley. I 
have now before me a modern British skull which closely approaches 
it, nay, is rather more flattened in the frontal region on account of 
the very faintly marked condition of the frontal eminences. I may 
refer here also to. a fragment of a skull, perhaps that of an old monk, in 
the collection of Christ Church, Oxford (shown me by Professor Rolles- 
ton), and to the cast of the cranium of Archbishop Dunbar (obiit 1547), 
in the Museum of the Scottish Society of Antiquaries, in both of which 
there is a remarkably flattened and retreating forehead. 
Professor King lays great stress upon the coexistence of the pro- 
jecting supra-orbital ridges and retreating forehead in the Neanderthal 
skull; more especially with regard to the part of the frontal bone, 
which is intersected by a line drawn at right angles to the glabello- 
occipital line through the infero-anterior angles of the two outer 
orbital processes. I cannot but think that if Professor King, instead 
of selecting for his comparison such a recent human skull as the one 
he figures in Plate 2, Fig. 5,* had taken a human skull presenting in 
combination a retreating forehead and projecting ridges (such as 
represented in Fig. 1), he would have found that no great difference 
existed between it and the Neanderthal skull in the amount of frontal 
bone cut off by such a line. 
I have already stated that Professor Huxley attaches much 
importance to the shape of the Neanderthal skull in its occipital 
region. He describes the squamous part of the occipital bone as 
sloping obliquely upward and forward from the protuberance and 
superior curved line, so that when the glabello-occipital line is made 
horizontal, the occipital protuberance occupies the extreme posterior 
end of the skull, and the lambdoidal suture is situated well on the 
upper surface of the cranium; as a result of which the posterior lobe 
of the brain would have been flattened and diminished. 
But if this mode of description be adopted, it must be borne in 
mind that the upward and forward slope is not that of a plane surface. 
For the squamous plate of the bone possesses a curved surface with 
the convexity projecting backwards and upwards, though this con- 
vexity is undoubtedly much smaller than the greater majority of 
well-formed crania exhibit. ‘Then again I find, from measurements 
of the cast of this skull, that the greatest antero-posterior diameter is 
not included in a line drawn between the glabella and occipital pro- 
tuberance, but in a line drawn from the glabella to a point in the 
squamous part of the occiput, about half-an-inch above the protuber- 
ance; though whether this point may in this individual have been the 
most projecting part of the head posteriorly, it is impossible to say, 
on account of the difficulty of placing this fragment of a skull in its 
natural position. 
But to follow out the method which we have hitherto pursued in 
this investigation, let us now, by a comparison of this part of the 
Neanderthal skull with the corresponding region in other human 
* Jan. No. ‘Quarterly Journal of Science.’ 
