382 



NATURE 



[Sept. 2, 1875 



and previously unfigured species, and Cooper's " Birds of 

 California," devoted to an account of the birds of the Pacific 

 coast-region, which has been edited by Prof. Baird from the late 

 Mr. Cooper's MSS. Of the last-named work, however, only the 

 first volume is yet published. It will be thus seen that we have 

 ample means of acquiring the most recent information on the 

 birds of the Nearctic Region, and in fact in no part of the world, 

 except Europe itself, is our knowledge of the endemic avifauna 

 so nearly approaching towards completion. 



(c.) Reptiles and Batrachians oj North America. — Holbrook's 

 "North American," in five quarto volumes, published at 

 Philadelphia in 1843-4, contams coloured figures of all the 

 North American Reptiles and Batrachians known to the 

 author, and is a reliable work. A large amount of information 

 has been acquired since that period and published in the vaiious 

 ** Railway Reports " and periodicals by Hallowell, Baird, Cope, 

 and others. In 1853 Messrs. Baird and Girard published a 

 catalogue of North American Serpents, and Prof. Agassiz 

 devoted the first volume of his "Contributions" mainly to 

 the Testudinata of North America. Prof. Baird tells me that 

 Prof Cope is now engaged in printing a new catalogue of the 

 Reptiles and Batrachians of North America, which will contain 

 an enumeration of all the species and ;^an account of their 

 geographical distribution. 



{&.)Fishes of North America. — Of the fishes of North America 

 there is up to the present time no one authority, and the in- 

 quirer must refer to the various works of De Kay, Agassiz, 

 and Girard for information. This, aided by the copious 

 references in Dr. Giinther's masterly Catalogue, he will have 

 little difficulty in obtaining, so far as it is available. But 

 the " History of American Fishes " is still to be written, and I 

 have no doubt that our energetic brethren of the United States 

 will before long bring it to pass. 



2. Greenland. 



Of Greenland, which is undoubtedly part of the Nearctic 

 Region, I have made a separate section in order to call special 

 attention to the "Manual" for the use of the Arctic Expedi- 

 tion of 1875, prepared under the direction of the Arctic 

 Committee of the Royal Society. A resume of all that is 

 yet known of the biology of Greenland is included in this 

 volume. I may call special attention to the article on the Birds 

 by Prof. Newton, and on the Fishes by Dr. Liitken, both pre- 

 pared specially for this work. I am sure you will all join with 

 me in thanking the present Government for sending out this new 

 expedition so fully prepared in every way, and in hoping that 

 large additions may be made to the store of information already 

 accumulated in the " Manual." 



(To be continued.) 



Department of Anthropology. 



Address by George Rolleston, M.D., F.R.S., F.S.A., 



President of the Department. 



Dr. Rolleston began his address by referring to a few of the 

 principal papers which were to be brought before the depart- 

 ment. He referred in congratulatory terms to the work in the 

 Pacific Islands brought out this year by Dr. Carl E. Meinicke, 

 and to an article' by the Rev. S. J. Whitmee in the Contemporary 

 Review for February as the most important recent contribu- 

 tion to the ethnology of Polynesia. He then spoke in high 

 terms of the services rendered to the native Polynesians by the 

 missionaries, quoting to the same effect from Ger land's con- 

 tinuation of Wurtz's "Anthropologic." He also referred criti- 

 tically to Mr. BageliOt's statement that savages did not formerly 

 waste away before the classical nations, as they do now before 

 the modern civilised nations. He then went on to say ; — 



I come now to the consideration of the subject of craniology 

 and craniography. Of the value of the entirety of the physical 

 history of a race there is no question ; but two very widely 

 opposed views exist as to the value of skull-measuring to the 

 ethnographer. According to the views of one school, cranio- 

 graphy and ethnography are all but convertible terms ; another 

 set of teachers insist upon the great width of the limits within 

 which normal human crania from one and the same race 

 may oscillate, and upon the small value which, under such cir- 

 cumstances, we can attach to differences expressed in tenths of 

 inches or even of centimetres. As usual, the truth will not be 

 found to be in either extreme view. For the proper performance 

 of a craniographic estimation, two very different processes are 

 necessary : one is the carrying out and recording a number of 



measurements ; the other is the artistic appreciation of the 

 general impressions as to contour and type which the survey of 

 a series of skulls produce upon one. I have often thought that 

 the work of conducting an examination for a scholarship or fel- 

 lowship is very similarly dependent, when it is properly carried 

 out, upon the employment of two methods — one being the system 

 of marking, the other that of getting a general impression as to 

 the power of the several candidates ; and I would wish to be 

 understood to mean by this illustration not only that the two lines 

 of inquiry are both dependent upon the combination and counter- 

 checking of two different methods, but also that their results, like 

 the results of some other human investigations, must not be 

 always, even though they may be sometimes, considered to be 

 free from all and any need for qualification. Persons like M. 

 Broca and Prof. Aeby, who have carried out the most extensive 

 series of measurements, are not the persons who express them- 

 selves in the strongest language as to craniography being, the 

 universal solvent in ethnography or anthropology. Aeby, for 

 example, in his " Schadelformen der Menschen und der Affen," 

 1867, p. 61, says: — "Aus dem gesagten geht hervor dass die 

 Stellung der Anthropologic gegeniiber den Schadelformen eine 

 ausserordentlich schwierige ist;" and the perpetual contradiction 

 of the results of the skull-measurements carried out by others, 

 which his paper (published in last year's " Archiv fiir Anthro- 

 pologic," pp. 12, 14, 20) abounds in, furnishes a practical com- 

 mentary upon the just quoted words. And Broca's words are 

 especially worth quoting, from the " Bulletin de la Societe 

 d' Anthropologic de Paris," Nov. 6, 1873, p. 824: — "Dans 

 I'etat actuel de nos connaissances la craniologie ne peut avoir la 

 pretention de voler de ses propres ailes, et de substituer ses 

 diagnostics aux notions fournies par I'ethnologie et par I'archseo- 

 logie." 



I would venture to say that the way in which a person with the 

 command of a considerable number of skulls procured from some 

 one district in modern times, or from some one kind of tumulus or 

 sepulchre in prehistoric times, would naturally address. himself to 

 the work of arranging them in a museum, furnishes us with a con- 

 crete illustration of the true limits of craniography, I say, " a 

 person with the command of a considerable number of skulls ; " for, 

 valuable as a single skull may be, and often is, as furnishing the 

 missing link in a gradational series, one or two sku-Ils by them- 

 selves do not justify us (except in rare instances, which I will 

 hereinafter specify) in predicating anything as to their nationality. 

 Greater rashness has never been shown, even in a realm of 

 science from which rashness has only recently been proceeded 

 against under an Alien Act, than in certain speculations as to 

 the immigration of races into various corners ot the world, based 

 upon the casual discovery in such places of single skulls, which 

 skulls were identified on the ground of their individual cha- 

 racters as having belonged to races shown on no other evidence 

 to have ever set foot there. 



It is, of course, possible enough for a skilled craniographer to 

 be right in referring even a single skull to some particular 

 nationality ; an Australian or an Eskimo, or an Andamanese 

 might be so referred with some confidence ; but all such successes 

 should be recorded with the reservation suggested by the words, 

 ubi eorum qui perierunt 'i and by the English line, " The many 

 fail, the one succeeds." They are the shots which have hit and 

 have been recorded. But if it is unsafe to base any ethnographic 

 conclusions upon the examination of one or two skulls, it is not 

 so when we can examine about ten times as many — ten, that is 

 to say, or twenty, the locality and the dates of which are known 

 as certain quantities. A craniographer thus fortunate casts his 

 eye over the entire series, and selects from it one or more which 

 correspond to one of the great types based by Retzius not merely 

 upon consideration of proportionate lengths and breadths, but 

 also upon the artistic considerations of type, curve, and contour. 

 He measures the skulls thus selected, and so furnishes himself 

 with a check which even the most practised eye cannot safely 

 dispense with. He then proceeds to satisfy himself as to whether 

 the entire series is referable to one alone of the two great typical 

 forms of Brachycephaly or Dolichocephaly, or. whether both 

 types are represented in it, and if so, in what proportions and 

 with what admbcture of intermediate forms. With a number of 

 Peruvian, or, indeed, of Western American skulls generally, of 

 Australian, ofTasmanian, of Eskimo, ofVeddah, of Andamanese 

 crania before him, the craniographer would nearly always, setting 

 aside a few abnormally aberrant (which are frequently morbid) 

 specimens, refer them all to one single type.* 



* It is not by any means entirely correct to say that there is no variety 

 observable among races living in isolated savage urity. The good people of 



