594 DESCRIPTION OF FIGURES OF SKULLS. 



in the width and strength of the upper and lower jaws; and, 

 fifthly, in the minor yet not wholly unimportant point of the 

 disparity of size between the upper and lower squama occipitis with 

 their respective nervous contents. Nor is prognathism, which 

 is almost always absent in these priscan skulls, by any means 

 always present in the artificially deformed ones of modern times. 

 Skulls like the one just described have a calculable brain weight of 

 54 oz. avoirdupois, which is considerably above the average weight 

 49-5 oz. for European males in modern times ; their powerful lower 

 jaw and the bones of their limbs show them to have been possessed 

 of muscular strength at least as much superior to that of average 

 men ; and their owners, for these as well as for other reasons which 

 it is not my purpose to discuss here 1 , may be very reasonably 

 supposed to have been chiefs of their clan or tribe. The physical 

 peculiarities however of individuals in such positions are very 

 usually imitated by other members of their clan, tribe, or nation; and 

 it may be suggested that the habit of artificially deforming the head, 

 at all events as we see it most commonly done when it results in the 

 production of a form like the one just described, may have arisen 

 from the wish to give a child from the first the outlines which 

 distinguished some adult whose vigour had placed him in a position 

 of eminence and command 2 . 



1 See Address to Anthropological Subsection, British Assoc. Report for 1875, p. 150. 



2 It is not entirely easy even with a large number, as in the Oxford Museum, of 

 artificially deformed skulls to be perfectly certain that such a skull as the one above 

 described cannot have owed its peculiar contour to compression purposively exercised 

 upon it during the period of infancy. Some sort of a priori probability in favour of 

 this skull having been endowed with its peculiar shape by this means arises of course 

 from its very close resemblance to the Oregon, Peruvian, and other antero-posteriorly 

 compressed skulls which we know as a matter of fact to have been so treated, and 

 which we see to be as free, if they be skulls of aged individuals, from any traces of 

 the severe treatment they underwent in the first two years of life, as in the skull now 

 before us. It is obvious, whatever may be said to the contrary, that a deformation 

 which goes so far as materially to alter the relative proportions of the several lobes of 

 the brain to each other without materially altering the anatomical relation of those 

 lobes to the skull bones covering them, which M. Broca has (Bulletin de la Soci<St 

 d'Anthropologie, 1870, p. 115) shown that the ' Deformation Toulonnaise ' actually 

 does, must be put in play in these early days. For of the 22 inches or so ( = 555 mm.) 

 which may be taken (Bischoff, Sitzungsberichte Kon-bayer. Akad. Wiss. Miinchen, 

 1864, Bd. i. p. 39) as the average head circumference of a living male adult, no less, 

 but a little more, than nineteen inches and a half ( = 500 mm. = 19'685") have been 

 shown by Liharzig (Gesetz des Wachsthums, 1862, p. 17, Taf . 5) to be attained by 

 the male child of twenty -one months old. And between twenty-one months and the 

 age to which the owner of such a skull as this must have attained, abundant time 

 would have been afforded for smoothing down, rounding off, and removing any such 

 traces of the action of any deforming apparatus as are sometimes to be seen in younger 

 skulls (e.g. in a skull from Vancouver's Island, No. 826 a. Oxford Museum) which 



