UPON THE SERIES OF PREHISTORIC CRANIA. 695 



suture persists with comparative frequency in the skulls of brachy- 

 cepbali as observed by His and Riitimeyer in the skulls of their 

 ' Disentis Typus ' (Cran. Helvetica, p. 27), and by Dr. Thurnam 

 and myself in the skulls of the bronze and later periods ; and on 

 a third with the fact that frontal bones with a persistent suture 

 are all but invariably broader than allied skulls not bifid, we may 

 feel ourselves justified in considering the extreme rarity of this 

 suture in Silurian skulls as another indication of their inferiority 

 to those of the later or Cimbric race. And we are further justified 

 in saying that Mr. Darwin has been misinformed when he says of 

 this suture (Descent of Man, 1st ed. p. 124, 2nd ed. p. 39) that it 

 persists ' more frequently in ancient than in recent crania, especially, 

 as Canestrini has observed, in those exhumed from the Drift and 

 belonging to the brachy-cephalic type.' The true rationale of the 

 persistence of the frontal suture would appear to be that it is a 

 teleological accommodation to the needs of the enlarging brain of 

 an advancing civilisation, with which enlargement is correlated 

 a diminution of the size of the jaws, and of the necessity for the 

 rotation of the brain and the frontal bone backwards which has 

 been so often noted here (see p. 643 supra) as occurring in macro- 

 gnathous men, and which is carried out still further in the 

 * villainously low foreheads' of the apes. 



We may now pass to the consideration of the few pathological 

 deformations which have been noted in these prehistoric skulls and 

 skeletons ; and we may begin by recording 



I. Abnormal Ossifications. 



Dr. Thurnam in his c Further Researches and Observations on 

 the two principal Forms of Ancient British Skulls/ p. 33, suggested 

 that some ethnical importance might attach to the fact that in 



shown (see p. 676 supra) to increase in complexity and extent with increase of intel- 

 ligence. This principle was laid down in the year 1740, by Hanauld in the Memoires 

 de 1'Academie royale de Paris, p. 371 ; it has been reaffirmed by Dr. Theodor Simon, 

 to whom I owe the foregoing reference, in an excellent though short paper in 

 Virchow^s Archiv, torn. 58, 1873 ; by Virchow himself, I. c., torn. 13, 1858 ; Abhand- 

 lungen Akad. Wiss. Berlin, 1876, Ueber einige Merkmale niederer Menschen Rassen 

 am Schadel, p. 112, ibique citata ; and by Hyrtl, Lehrbuch der Anatomic des 

 Menschen, 8th ed. 1863, p. 245. Welcker's views (given in his Wachsthum und 

 Ban des Menschlichen Schadels, p 99) as to the hereditary transmission of this 

 peculiarity are confirmed by the presence of it in four out of the sixteen skulls 

 recovered by me from the Dinnington tumulus. In two of these not mentioned by 

 Dr. Thurnam the traces of the suture are only rudimentary ; and in none of the four 

 does it reach the inner table, which it does however in the Rodinarton and in the 

 Upper Swell crania, both also in this Museum. 



