42 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [BULL. 33 



They are skulls of people of a different race with which no further 

 acquaintance has yet been made in this country. What this race was, 

 the writer was not able to show at the time of the publication of the 

 report in 1902. Two possibilities suggested themselves at that time : 

 One, that the crania represented some non-Indian people who pre 

 ceded the Lenape about Trenton; the other, that they might be crania 

 of later intruders or immigrants into that region. The former 

 theory could not be accepted without further proof, and the immigrant 

 idea seemed hardly plausible, for the Delaware valley had been settled 

 largely by Swedes, whose cranial type is radically different. On the 

 whole, there are very few localities known, in Europe or elsewhere, 

 where normally very low skulls had been observed. 



The problem was slowly followed up, a search being made in the 

 American collections for examples and in European literature for 

 reports of crania similar to the two skulls under consideration. As 

 to other specimens on this continent, it was found that in very rare 

 instances a low skull occurs normally among the Indians, but none of 

 the few examples seen were of the type of the two Trenton crania, 

 the faces especially differing therefrom. The whole research strength 

 ened the conclusion that the Burlington County and Eiverview Ceme 

 tery skulls are not Indian. The quest in literature, how r ever, had a 

 result which may come very near a definite explanation of the enigma. 

 In 1874 VirchoAV reported a number of extraordinarily low skulls 

 mainly from northwestern Germany, from the Elbe to the coast of 

 Holland, drawing attention at the same time to several &quot; Batavian &quot; 

 specimens and others of the same nature from the islands in the Zuy- 

 der Zee that had been pictured or described previously.^ All of these 

 skulls were comparatively recent, the oldest not dating beyond about 

 the ninth century of our era. The majority ranged in form from 

 mesocephaly to brachycephaly ; in capacity, from 1,215 to 1,700 

 c. c. ; and in vertical height, c from 12 to 12.85 cm. Several of the 

 skulls showed a depression of the base; the majority were free from 

 any indication of a pathological condition. Virchow recognized 

 these skulls as constituting a distinct cranial form and called the type 

 cfiamcecephaly. He thought he recognized it in some Dutch paint 

 ings. As to its significance, he was undecided. 



A year later J. W. Sprengel published an account d of some Zuyder 



a R. Virchow, Uber eine niedrige Schlidelform in Norddeutschlnnd, ZeitscJir. f. Eth- 

 nol., vi, 239-251, taf. xvii, 1874. See also Zeitschr. f. Ethnol., ix, 41, 1877, and consult 

 in this connection His and Rutimeyer s Crania Helvetica. 



6 Particularly in Blumenbach s Decades craniorum, pi. Ixiii, and in v. d. Hoeven s Cata 

 logue craniorum. 



c Virchow measured this height from basion to the highest point of the skulls anterior 

 to the middle of the sagittal sut.ire. This measurement exceeds that of basion-bregrna 

 by from 1 to 5 mm. 



d Schadel von Neanderthal Typus, Arch. f. Anthrop., vin, 49-6G, pi. v-viii, 1875. 



