CHAP. V. COMPARISON OF HUMAN AND SIMIAN SKULLS. 89 



and Neanderthal skulls, seem to me to prohibit any cautious rea- 

 soner from affirming the latter to have been necessarily of distinct 

 races. 



" The marked resemblances between the ancient skulls and their 

 modern Austi-alian analogues, however, have a profound interest, 

 when it is recollected that the stone axe is as much the weapon and 

 the implement of the modern as of the ancient savage ; that the 

 former turns the bones of the kangaroo and of the emu to the same 

 account as the latter did the bones of the deer and the urus ; that 

 the Australian heaps up the shells of devoured shellfish in mounds 

 which represent the ' refuse-heaps,' or ' Kjokkenmoddings,' of 

 Denmark ; and, finally, that, on the other side of Torres Straits, a 

 race akin to the Australians are among the few people who now 

 build their houses on pile-works, like those of the ancient Swiss 

 lakes. 



" That this amount of resemblance in habit and in the conditions of 

 existence is accompanied by as close a resemblance in cranial con- 

 figuration, illustrates on a great scale that what Cuvier demonstrated 

 of the animals of the Nile valley is no less true of men : circum- 

 stances remaining similar, the savage varies little more, it would 

 seem, than the ibis or the crocodile, esi^ecially if we take into ac- 

 count the enormous extent of the time over which our knowledge of 

 man now extends, as compared with that measured by the duration 

 of the sepulchres of Egypt. 



"Finally, the comparatively large cranial capacit}''of the Neander- 

 thal skull, overlaid though it may be by pithecoid bony walls, and 

 the completely human proportions of the accompanying limb-bones, 

 together with the very fair development of the Engis skull, clearly 

 indicate that the first traces of the primordial stock whence man has 

 proceeded need no longer be sought, by those who entertain any form 

 of the doctrine of progressive development, in the newest tertiaries ; 

 but that they may be looked for in an epoch more distant from the 

 age of the Elcphas prim'i genius than that is from us." 



The two skulls which form the subject of the preceding 

 comments and illustrations have given rise to nearly an 

 equal amount of surprise, for opposite reasons; that of Engis^ 

 because, being so unequivocally ancient, it approached so 

 near to the highest or Caucasian type; that of the Neander- 

 thal, because, having no such decided claims to antiquity, it 

 departs so widely from the normal standard of humanity. 



