Sept. 2, 1875J 



NATURE 



385 



readily enough explicable by a reference to the operations of 

 causes exemplifications of the working of which are unhappily 

 not far to seek now, and may be found in any detail you please 

 in those anthropologically interesting (however otherwise un- 

 pleasant) documents, the Police Reports. 



Having before my mind the liability we are all under falla- 

 ciously to content ourselves with recording the shots which hit, I 

 must not omit to say that one at least of the more recently 

 propounded doctrines in craniology does not seem to me to be 

 firmly established. This is the doctrine of "occipital dolicho- 

 cephaly " being a characteristic of the lower races of modem 

 days and of prehistoric races as compared with modern civilised 

 races. I have not been able to convince myself by my own 

 measurements of the tenability of this position ; and I observe 

 that Ihering has expressed himself to the sa«ie effect, appending 

 his measurements in proof of his statements in his paper, " Zur 

 Reform der Craniometrie," published in the " Zeitschrift fiir 

 Ethnologie " for 1873. The careful and colossal measurements 

 of Aeby * and Welsbach f have shown that the occipital region 

 enjoys wider limits of oscillation than either of the other divi- 

 sions of the cranial vault. I have some regret in saying this, 

 partly because writers on such subjects as "Literature and 

 Dogma " have already made use of the phrase '* occipitally 

 dolichocephalic," as if it represented one of the permanent ac- 

 quisitions of science ; and I say it with even more regret, as it 

 concerns the deservedly honoured names •f Gratiolet and of 

 Broca, to whom anthropology owes so much. What is true in 

 the doctrine relates, among other things, to what is matter 

 of common observation as to the fore part of the head rather 

 than to anything which is really constant in the back part 

 of the skull. This matter of common observation is to the 

 effect that when the ear is "well forward" in the head 

 we do ill to augur well of the intelligence of its owner. 

 Now, the fore part of the brain is irrigated by the carotid 

 arteries, which, though smaller in calibre during the first years 

 of life, during which the brain so nearly attains its full size, than 

 they are in the adult, are nevertheless relatively large even in 

 those early days, and are both absolutely, and relatively to the 

 brain which they have to nourish, much larger than the vertebral 

 arteries, which feed its posterior lobes. It is easy therefore to 

 see that a brain in which the fore part supplied by the carotids 

 has been stinted of due supplies of food, or however stunted in 

 growth, is a brain the entire length and breadth of which is 

 likely to be ill-nourished. As I have never seen reason to be- 

 lieve in any cerebral localisation which was not explicable by a 

 reference to vascular irrigation, it was with much pleasure that 

 I read the remarks of Messrs. Wilks and Moxon in their recently 

 published "Pathological Anatomy," pp. 207, 208, as to the in- 

 dications furnished by the distribution of the Tacchionian bodies 

 as to differences existing in the blood-currents on the back and 

 those on the fore part of the brain. These remarks are the 

 more valuable, as mere hydraulics, Professor Clifton assures me, 

 would not have so clearly pointed out what the physiological 

 upgrowths seem to indicate. Any increase, again, in the length 

 of the posterior cerebral arteries is pro tanto a disadvantage to 

 the parts they feed. If the blood- current, as these facts seem to 

 show, is slower^ in the posterior lobes of the brain, it is, upon 

 purely physical principles of endosmosis and exosmosis, plain that 

 these segments of the brain are less efficient organs for the mind 

 to work with ; and here again, " occipital dolichocephaly " would 

 have a justification, though one founded on the facts of the nutri- 

 tion of the brain-cells, not on the proportions of the braincase. 

 In many (but not in all) parts of Continental Europe, again, the 

 epithet " long-headed " would not have the laudatory connotation 

 which, thanks to our Saxon blood, and in spite of the existence 

 amongst us of other varieties of dolichocephaly, it still retains 

 here. Now, the brachycephalic head which, abroad J at least, 

 is ordinarily a more capacious one, and carried on more vigorous 

 shoulders and by more vigorous owners altogether, than the 

 dolichocephalic, strikes a man who has been used to live amongst 

 dolichocephali by nothing more forcibly, when he first comes to 

 take notice of it, than by the nearness of its external ear to the 

 back of the head ; and this may be said to constitute an artistic 

 occipital brachycephalism. But this does not imply that the 

 converse condition is to be found conversely correlated, nor does 



• Aeby, "Schadelform des Menschen und der Affen," pp. 11, 12, and 

 128. 

 t:Weisbach, "Die Schad 

 X See upon this point :- 



t^Weisbach, "Die Schadelform der Boumanen," P- 321 1869. 

 -Broca, Bull. Soc. Anth. Paris, ii. p. 

 ibid. Dec. s, 1872 ; Virchow, Archiv fiir Anth. v. p. 535 ; Zeitschrift fiir 



648, 1861 ; 



Ethnol. iv. 2, p. 36; Sammlungen, ix, 193, p. 45, 1874 ; Beddoe, Mem. Anth. 

 Soc. Lond. ii. p. 350. 



it justify the use of the phrase " occipital dolichocephaly " in 

 any etymological, nor even in any ethnographical, sense. 



I shall now content myself, as far as craniology is concerned, 

 by an enumeration of some at least of the various recent memoirs 

 upon the .subject which appear to me to be of pre-eminent value. 

 And foremost amongst these I will mention Professor Cleland's 

 long and elaborate scientific and artistic paper on the Variations 

 of the Human Skull, which appear in the " Philosophical 

 Transactions " for 1869. Next I will name Ecker's admirable, 

 though shorter, memoir on Cranial Curvature, which appeared 

 in the "Archiv fiir Anthropologic," a journal already owing 

 much to his labours, in the year 1871. Aeby's writings I have 

 already referred to, and Ihering's, to be found in recent numbers 

 of the "Archiv fiir Anthropologie " and the "Zeitschrift fiir 

 Ethnologie," deserve your notice. Prefessor Bischoff's paper 

 on the Mutual Relations of the horizontal circumference of the 

 Skull and of its contents to each other and to the weight of the 

 Brain, has not, as I think, obtained the notice which it deserves. 

 It is to be found in the " Proceedings " of the Royal Society of 

 Munich for 1864, the same year which witnessed the publication 

 of the now constantly quoted " Crania Helvetica," of Professors 

 His and Riitimeyer. Some of the most important results con- 

 tained in this work, and much important matters besides, was 

 made advailable to the exclusively English reader by Professor 

 Huxley two years later, in the " Pre-historic Remains of 

 Caithness." I have made a list, perhaps not an exhaustive one, 

 but containing some dozen memoirs by Dr. Beddoe, and having 

 read them or nearly all of them, I can with a very safe con- 

 science recommend you all to do the like. I can say nearly the 

 same as regards Broca and Virchow, adding that the former of 

 these two savaits has set the other two with v/hom I have 

 coupled him an excellent example, by collecting and publishing 

 his papers in consecutive volumes. 



But I should forget not only what is due to the place in which 

 I am speaking, but what is due to the • subject I am here con- 

 cerned with, if, in speaking of its literature, I omitted the 

 name of your own townsman, Prichard. He has been called, 

 and, I think, justly, the " father of modern anthropology," 

 I am but putting the same thing in other words, and adding 

 something more specific to it, when I compare his works to 

 those of Gibbon and Thirlwall, and say that they have attained 

 and seem likely to maintain permanently a position and import- 

 ance commensurate with that of the "stately and undecaying" 

 productions of those great English historians. Subsequently to 

 the first appearance of those histories other works have appeared 

 by other authors, who have dealt in them with the same periods 

 of time. I have no wish to depreciate those works ; their 

 authors have not rarely rectified a slip and corrected an error 

 into which their great predecessors had fallen. Nay, more, the 

 later comers have by no means neglected to avail themselves of tlie 

 advantages which the increase of knowledge and the vast 

 political experience of the last thirty years have put at their 

 disposal, and they have thus occasionally had opportunities of 

 showing more of the true proportions and relations of even 

 great events and catastrophes. Still the older works retain a 

 lasting value, and will remain as solid testimonies to English 

 intellect and English capacity for large undertakings as long as 

 our now rapidly extending language and literature live. The 

 same may be most truthfully said of Prichard's "Researches 

 into the Physical History of Mankind. " An increase of know- 

 ledge may supply us with fresh and with stronger arguments than 

 he could command for some of the great conclusions for which 

 he contended ; such, notably, has been the case in the question 

 (though question it can no longer be called) of the Unity of the 

 human species ; and by the employment of the philosophy of 

 continuity and the doctrine of evolution, with which the world 

 was not made acquainted till more than ten years after Prichard's 

 death, many a w eaker man than he has been enabled to bind 

 into more readily manageable burdens the vast collections of facts 

 with which he had to deal. Still his works remain, massive, 

 impressive, enduring — much as the headlands along our southern 

 coast stand out in the distance in their own grand outlines, whilst 

 a close and minute inspection is necessary for the discernment of 

 the forts and fosses added to them, indeed dug out of their 

 substance in recent times. If we consider what the condition of 

 the subject was when Prichard addressed himself to it, we shall 

 be the better qualified to take and make an estimate of his 

 merits. This Prichard has himself described to us, in a passage 

 to be found in the preface to the third volume of the third 

 edition of the " Physical History," published in the year 1841, 

 and reminding one forcibly of a similar utterance of Aristotle's 



