DESCRIPTION OF FIGURES OF SKULLS. 607 



individual, and some of the characteristics of its sex, which was established mainly 

 by an examination of its trunk and limb bones, have been, as female cranial cha- 

 racters sometimes are, masked by the inroads of senile changes. It is interesting to 

 note that the femora of this aged woman resembled those of this young male subject 

 and those of the young woman next to be described, in having the spiral line joining 

 the linea aspera and the anterior intertrochanteric line well marked. The aged 

 female skull, ' Langton, ii. 2/ differs from both the others with which it has been 

 compared in retaining the prominence of the parietal tubera so commonly observable 

 in skulls up to the time when, with the evolution of the second set of teeth, the lower 

 part of the skull widens out with the widening of the jaws. The absence of 

 prominence of the region of the parietal tuberosities is one of the characters 

 given by His and Riitimeyer as characteristic of the Hohberg type, an undoubtedly 

 old form of skull; the presence of such prominence, on the other hand, is given 

 by Schaafhausen (Die Urform des menschlichen Schadels, p. 7) as characteristic 

 of priscan skulls. A consideration of these three skulls taken together with that 

 of some of the facts of skull-development, will show how these statements may 

 be reconciled. The parietal tuberosities are as distinctively characteristic of 

 the human cranium as is the lobule of the marginal convolution called 'lobulus 

 tuberis' by Huschke (Schaedel, Him, and Seele, p. 142, 1854); the full distance 

 between them (135 mill.) however, within some three millimeters, is attained to as 

 early as ten years of age. See Welcker, Wachsthum und Bau, p. 127. They are 

 prominent in the skulls of quite young human subjects even of savage races, as e.g. 

 the Australians and Coles (see skulls mentioned in note on p. 615 infra}, whilst on the 

 other hand they are only very faintly indicated in the skulls even of the antheropo- 

 morphous apes. Further, it is, as might have been expected, a fact (see Weisbach, 

 Archiv fur Anthropologie, iii. p. 71) that the intertuberal diameter is identical for the 

 two sexes, or nearly so. It is now easy to see how female skulls which fail to attain 

 the l rounding out of the sides of the skull which occurs from the latest expansion of 

 the brain ' (see Cleland, Phil. Trans. 1870, p. 149), and which retain in this particular 

 of comparative narrowness of the transverse diameter of the basis cranii (see Weis- 

 bach, I. c. p. 68), as in some others, childlike characters, will have their parietal tubera 

 relatively prominent ; and how ill-filled male skulls in ill-fed races may come to re- 

 semble them in this point. In well-filled male skulls, on the other hand, the prominence 

 of the parietal tubera is lost in the general globosity produced by the widening out of 

 the lower parts of the brain. 



