ANTHROPOMETRY 89 



SKELETAL PARTS: THE SKULL 



The art of measuring the skeletal parts differs in many respects 

 from that of measuring the living and is, in fact, to a degree a field 

 of its own. It is, moreover, a particularly attractive field, for we deal 

 here with specimens that are not masked by other tissues, that can be 

 handled cleanly and easily, and that are mostly completely at our 

 disposal for reference or additional observation. 



The most interesting and important part of the skeleton is naturally 

 the cranium, and this has received from the beginnings of anthropology 

 the most assiduous attention. The preoccupation of anthropologists 

 with the skull, 1 particularly since the repeated discoveries of the re- 

 mains of early man, has in fact been such as to overshadow the study 

 of the rest of the skeleton, with the result that methods relating to 

 research on the long and other bones are with some exceptions less 

 developed and standardized than those on the skull. Yet these 

 secondary skeletal parts are a mine of information of anthropological 

 interest, and as time goes on they cannot but receive more and more 

 attention. The time for a selection of the best methods of measuring 

 as well as observation on the more important of these parts is at hand, 

 and in the final section of this series an attempt will be made in this 

 direction. The present section is devoted mainly to the cranium. 



CRANIOMETRY 



Efforts at a development of a scientific system of cranial measure- 

 ments and observations date from well before the beginning of the 

 nineteenth century. The most serious and at the same time successful 

 steps in this direction were, however, those of Samuel G. Morton in 

 Philadelphia in the late thirties of that century, of Anders Retzius in 

 Sweden (1842-1860), and especially those of Paul Broca in France, 

 from the early sixties onward. Broca's system, which was eventually 

 comprised in the "Instructions craniologiques et craniometriques " 



1 See bibliographies in "International Catalogue of Scientific literature," in 

 Martin's "Lehrbuch d. Anthropologie," in author's "Physical Anthropology in the 

 United States" 8, Philadelphia, 1919), and in the Catalogue of the Library of the 

 Surgeon General, U. S. A. 



