710 GENERAL REMARKS 



I have already (p. 639 1 ) noted that the basis cranii in these 

 ancient crania has never been found by me to have suffered from 

 that pathological degradation which is known as the ' plastic de- 

 formation ' of Dr. Barnard Davis, the 'basilar impression' of Virchow, 

 the * impressio baseos cranii ' of other authors. 



The nasal index, which fails to separate the Eskimo from the 

 civilised races, fails equally with the long- barrow skulls, and, as has 

 been pointed out by Professor Broca (Rev. Anth., 1873, ii. p. 19), 

 with other prehistoric European skulls. On the other hand, the 

 orbital index, which does put the prehistoric crania from Cro- 

 Magnon and the Caverne de THornine into a position of similarity 

 to skulls such as those of the Tasmanian, Australian, and Melanesian 

 races, puts the neolithic skulls of British barrows into a position of 

 superiority as compared, not merely with the modern savages just 

 mentioned, but even with the skulls of the bronze period. As 

 regards these latter skulls however, it should be remarked that the 

 transversely oblong outline which their orbital border sometimes as- 

 sumes, as in the skulls ' Heslerton Wold,' described and figured at pp. 

 579-580, and ' Rudstone, Ixiii,' described and figured at pp. 590-591, 

 is due to an excessive downgrowth of the supraciliary ridges, rather 

 than to any curtailment of the distance between the actual roof of 

 the orbit and its inferior or maxillary border. In other words, just 

 as the prognathism of modern savages may depend simply upon in- 

 crease in size of the anterior alveolar segment of the upper jaw, so 

 a low orbital index may be and often is due to a downgrowth of 

 the upper border of the orbit, which comes thus to lie in a plane 

 much lower than that which the true roof of the orbit occupies. 



Professor Broca, in his account of the skulls from the Caverne de 

 FHomme Mort (Rev. Anth. /. c. pp. 26-28), after enumerating the 

 various points in which those nineteen crania contrast and agree 

 severally with those of the earlier race represented at Les Eyzies on 

 the one hand, and with those of later races on the other, declares him- 

 self of opinion that the race to which they belong, whilst affined to 

 the palaeolithic man, has no longer any distinct representatives upon 



1 The references made by me elsewhere (pp. 689-698 supra) to this interesting 

 pathological change were made merely for the sake of illustration. Dr. Barnard 

 Davis's paper was read before the Anthropological Society of Paris, June 5, 1862, 

 and may be found in Mem. Soc. Anthrop. de Paris, torn. i. p. 380. Subsequently a 

 memoir upon the subject was published by Dr. Boogaard in the Nederland Tijdschrift 

 voor Geneeskunde, 1865, 2. p. 81, an analysis of which by Dr. W. D. Moore appeared 

 in the Cambridge and Edinburgh Journal of Anatomy and Physiology, Nov. 1866, 

 p. 179. 



