UPON THE SERIES OF PREHISTORIC CRANIA. 715 



sight of the parietal and frontal eminences standing prominently 

 out in relief upon the wall-sided and vertically-ridged cranium. If 

 a contrast such as this can be shown to exist between a series of 

 what were all but certainly the crania of the most favourably con- 

 ditioned and best developed of the neolithic population and any 

 mixed series of later times down to this day from cemeteries in this 

 country, the contrast would undoubtedly have been very much more 

 sharply pronounced if we had had before us representatives of all 

 classes from those early times. 



Secondly, though well shaped and capacious calvarise with ortho- 

 gnathous upper jaws do abound in the series from the stone and 

 bone ages, and after bearing a comparison, and by no means always 

 to their own disadvantage, with modern specimens, may be only 

 with difficulty distinguishable from them, the same can hardly 

 be affirmed of that most distinctive bone, the lower jaw 1 . Enough 



1 The caves of Cro-Magnon and Mentone have furnished us with similar lower jaws 

 from the palaeolithic men whose remains have heen found in them, hut, as in the cases 

 of the Bushman and the Tasmanian, these lower jaws were combined with the low 

 orbit so different from that of the Esquimaux, the wide opening of which in the skull 

 contrasts so strikingly with the oblique, slit-like aperture of the eyelids in their living 

 heads. And the prognathism of the Esquimaux, though it is possible to lay too 

 much weight upon this point, as also the convex malar portions of the maxillaries, 

 will be held by many to differentiate him from the palaeolithic and neolithic races 

 both. On the other hand, Professor Broca (ReV. d'Anth., 1873, ii. pp. 26-28), with 

 the remains from the Caverne de FHomme Mort before him, has no difficulty in 

 connecting these neolithic with the palaeolithic men, and Professor Boyd Dawkins so 

 long ago as 1866 (see ' Cave Hunting/ p. 359, ibique citato) collected a set of coin- 

 cidences between the implements, works of art, and animal surroundings of these 

 latter men and those of the Esquimaux, the number and variety of which it is difficult 

 to explain except upon the hypothesis of some connection having subsisted between 

 them. Colonel Lane Fox and Mr. C. E. Kance are cited in the ' Reliquiae Aquitanicae/ 

 p. 284, as accepting and corroborating this view; and Sir John Lubbock at p. 262 

 of his edition of Nilsson's 'Early Inhabitants of Scandinavia/ whilst pointing out 

 that Mr. Busk's identification of Ursus prisons with Ursus ferox gives us some 

 additional 'reason for the belief that the Esquimaux once inhabitated Western 

 Europe/ uses language of a more cautious character as regards this conclusion than 

 perhaps he might have done had not the author whose work he was editing expressed 

 himself (pp. 104, 141) as being so very distinctly opposed to it. Mr. Alexander 

 C.Anderson, 'Reliquiae Aquitanicae/ p. 49, and M. Sauvage, ibid. p. 220, would appear 

 to be of the same opinion as Nilsson ; most recent anthropologists, however (see for 

 example Mr. E. B. Tylor, 'Primitive Culture/ vol. i. pp. 64, 95, ed. 1873, or the 

 various authorities, old and recent, cited in the Address to the Biological Section, 

 British Association, Liverpool, 1870, p. 103), incline to accept the argument from 

 identity of custom to identity of race. 



As regards the language of the Esquimaux, Professor Sayce has told us (Contemp. 

 Rev., April 1876, p. 722) that ' if we turn to the grammars of those savage tribes who 

 best represent the infancy of mankind we shall find them marked by the greatest 

 synthetic complexity. The involved and monstrous words of the polysynthetic languages 

 of North America, where the Esquimaux aglekkigiartorasucvrnipoJc, for instance, 

 represents our " he goes away hastily and exerts himself to write," are really examples 



