652 GENERAL REMARKS 



As has been however already said, the conformation of the lower 

 jaw in every well-marked variety of the human species is an 

 eminently distinctive element in the complex aggregate of peculia- 

 rities which make up its cranial character. The presence of pro- 

 gnathism in the upper jaw is by no means a point of such con- 

 sequence for distinguishing crania of prehistoric series inter se, as it 

 is for distinguishing them from those of later and of modern races. 

 For, as a matter of fact, prognatliism, which is not always constant 

 in its presence even in modern races reputedly prognathic, is by 

 no means common in crania from the early interments of Britain 

 and France, nor, according to His and Rutimeyer 1 , from those of 

 Switzerland ; nor, according to Virchow (Archiv fur Anth. vi. pp. 

 92, 93), from those of Belgium. The dolicho-cephalic skulls with 

 which we are now dealing contrast in no point more markedly with 

 the Anglo-Saxon skulls to which so many authors have stated that 

 they bear a very close resemblance, than they do in their com- 

 paratively slight and orthognathic upper jaw. And it may be 

 emphatically asserted that in the after all not so very common 

 cases in which the early British calvarise do closely resemble the 

 Anglo-Saxon, the upper and lower jaws will almost invariably be 

 found to furnish means for distinguishing them. The lower jaws 

 procured from long barrows, as from other interments, very 

 ordinarily far outnumber the calvarise which have been recovered 

 in such a condition as to admit of reconstruction, and there is never 

 the slightest difficulty in distinguishing such a series viewed as a 

 whole from a similar series from an Anglo-Saxon cemetery simply 

 by a reference to the more powerful development of the latter 

 series. It is true that occasionally powerful lower jaws have been 

 found belonging to prehistoric dolicho-cephalic crania. The exist- 

 ence of a i frons valde depressa ' (a conformation not usual in such 

 skulls) noted by Sir R. C. Hoare (Archseologia, xix. p. 46, 1821) 

 as present in a skull from a long barrow at Stony Littleton may 

 suggest the presence in that skull of a heavy jaw, to counterbalance 

 which the brain-case may have been rotated backwards (see pp. 

 615 and 623 supra). In the eminently dolicho-cephalic (cephalic 

 index 69) Ben-Djemma skull, rendered famous by the history given 

 (Types of Mankind, p. xl) of its presentation by the Oriental scholar 

 Fresnel to the American anthropologist Morton, a strikingly 



1 Herr Mandacli, writing of an ancient skull in the Museum at Zurich, says, 

 ' Rathselhaft aber bleibt immerhin das Auftreten dieses fast negerartigen Kopfes 

 inniitten der sonst orthognathen alten Helvetier.' Crania Helvetica, p. 63. 



