718 GENERAL REMARKS UPON THE SERIES OF PREHISTORIC CRANIA. 



often inwardly bent angle ; the outcome of the investigation may 

 be summed up by saying that though lower jaws combining 

 all these marks of degradation may be found amongst such races 

 as the Bushman, the Tasmanian, and the Melanesian, it is only 

 amongst the Eskimos that we find such jaws combined with the 

 widely open orbit and vertically elongated nasal cavity so charac- 

 teristic of the long-barrow race. And there are many reasons 

 for supposing that the Eskimos are a race which still retains and 

 preserves for us in the structure and grammatical peculiarities of 

 its language, its life-history, and physical peculiarities, the very 

 closest likeness to what we believe some of the earliest races of 

 mankind must have been. 



The disproportion which I have dwelt upon (p. 658 et seqq. supra) 

 as existing between the male and female limb- and trunk-bones from 

 the long barrows is a striking feature in the comparison of that 

 series with any other from later interments in this country. This 

 however is a skeletal character reproduced in and reproducible by 

 modern savagery. But the 'platycnemy' or peculiar flattening out 

 of the shin-bones, which we know from the researches of Professors 

 Busk and Broca and others to have characterised other early and 

 earlier races of men, has stronger claims to be considered a note of 

 antiquity; it is possible that such tibiae may be hereafter found 

 amongst modern savages ; but they will not, I anticipate, be found 

 amongst such races in the numerical proportion to normal bones 

 which I have found them to possess in neolithic skeletons. 



