UPON THE SERIES OF PREHISTORIC CRANIA. 713 



to those of the mediaeval and modern Dane ; and this similarity 

 must of course make it difficult to decide whether the brachy- 

 cephalism of many crania procurable from mediaeval and especially 

 urban mediaeval interments, is to be referred to the persistence of 

 such a brachy-cephalic prehistoric stock, or to the admixture of 

 Danish blood in historic times upon which writers such as Worsaae 

 (The Danes and Norwegians in England, Scotland,, and Ireland, 

 1852) and Isaac Taylor (Words and Places, 1865, p. 183) have 

 insisted with so much force. The discovery however by Dr. 

 Thurnam and myself 1 of numerous skeletons of a typically brachy- 

 cephalic tribe in a tumulus belonging to a period close upon 

 that of the Saxon invasion, and situated at Crawley in Oxford- 

 shire within the shadow of the protecting Forest of Wychwood, 

 renders it exceedingly probable that this vigorous race, after sur- 

 viving three centuries of Roman rule, may have endured till, at the 

 commencement of the historical Danish invasion and immigration, 

 there came into this country a stock to which they are beyond doubt 

 physically, and probably also ethnographically, most closely allied. 



The probable continuity in the way of descent of the long-barrow 

 people with certain varieties of our present population, considered 

 together with the fact that in these series we miss certain marks of 

 degradation which are recognisable in the confessedly more ancient 

 remains from certain continental 'finds' may tend to produce in 

 the mind of a reader an exaggerated as well as a somewhat morti- 

 fying notion of their inferiority in the matter of antiquity. I will 

 therefore, in conclusion and very shortly, enumerate the various 

 physical peculiarities of an anatomical, to the exclusion of an 

 archaeological, kind which have in spite of all the considerations 

 just put forward impressed me very deeply with a conviction of the 

 immense distance which separates our time from that of the long 

 barrows. First amongst these I should put the smallness of many 

 of the skeletal and of the cranial bones both, which I have obtained 

 from the long barrows alike of the cremation-kind, as in the East 

 Riding of Yorkshire, and of the inhumation-kind in Gloucestershire. 

 It is true enough that powerful skeletons and very large skulls 

 have been found by me in these British as well as by many other 

 investigators in many other interments of the same and of earlier 

 ages. So generally accepted 2 indeed is this a priori surprising 

 fact that we find writers such as Virchovv (Archiv fur Anthro- 



1 Archseologia, 1870, xlii. p. 175, and supra p. 657. 



2 See British Association Report for 1875, p. 150. 



