694 GENERAL REMARKS 



merely the feeling 1 common to all humanity that they who were 

 lovely and pleasant in their lives in their death should not be 

 divided. 



It still remains for me to put on record the little which I have 

 been able to note in the way of abnormalities, pathological and 

 other, in these prehistoric skeletons and skulls. 



Of the non-pathological abnormalities observable in this series 

 the persistence of the frontal suture is the only one which needs 

 special notice. It is exceedingly rare for this suture to remain 

 open in the earlier of the two series with which we have been 

 dealing, whilst it is by no means uncommon to find it retaining 

 its infantile patency after the coming of the brachy-cephalic 

 race. Dr. Thurnam, writing in 1865 (Nat. Hist. Review, April, 

 p. 245), said that of all the long-barrow skulls which he had 

 examined, four only, one from the chambered-barrow at West 

 Kennet, a second from the Eodmarton barrow (which has been 

 frequently figured, e.g. Cran. Brit., pi. 59; Archseologia, xlii. 

 pi. xiv. ; Thesaurus Craniorum, p. 8), and two from the Dinnington 

 long barrow (described by me in the Journal of Anatomy and 

 Physiology, vol. iii. 1868, p. 254), had been found possessing this 

 peculiarity. To this very small number I have, from all the 

 Silurian skulls exhumed since 1865, only been able to add the 

 skull of one adult, this one being the skull of the single skeleton 

 found undisturbed in the long barrow at Upper Swell, as described 

 by me at p. 529 supra; and one skull of a child of about 7 or 8 

 years of age, being one of the children found in the chamber of 

 the long barrow at Eyford, described above, p. 518, and Journ. 

 Anth. Institute, Oct. 1875, p. 158. Coupling these facts on one 

 side with the well-known fact of the extreme rarity of the per- 

 sistence of this frontal prolongation of the sagittal suture in the 

 skulls of modern savages 1 ; on another side with the fact that this 



1 This suture persists in a skull of an Andaman Islander presented to the Oxford 

 Museum by Professor Wood Mason of the Indian Museum, Calcutta; it has been noted 

 in an Abyssinian skull by Zuckerkandl, I, c. p. 65 ; it is seen in the figure of a skull 

 given by Professor Busk (Natural History Review, April, 1861, pi. v. p. 174) of a Red 

 Indian from an ancient burial-place in Tennessee, in which skull, Professor Busk informs 

 us, ' the supra-orbital prominence is most marked of all the crania in our possession ;' 

 and fourthly, it is seen in the figure of the skull treated of by Professor Broca in his 

 paper (in the Bulletin de la Socie'te d'Anthropologie de Paris, AoGt, 1871), ' Sur la Defor- 

 mation Toulousaine du Crane,' of which we find it recorded that ' Fos frontal est tres- 

 petit dans toutes ses dimensions.' But though small frontal bones may occasionally 

 retain this suture, there is no doubt that it is much more usually found in broad fore- 

 heads, and that the rationale of its formation lies in the early widening of the frontal 

 lobes of the brain, of the se'gments, that is, of that organ which are most indubitably 



