ON SOME FOSSIL REMAINS OF MAN 321 



Calmuck, of which a front and side view (reduced outline 

 copies of which are given in Figure 26) are depicted by 

 Von Baer in his excellent " Crania selecta," affords a very 

 admirable example of that kind of skull. Other skulls, 

 such as that of a Negro copied in Fig. 27 from Mr. Busk's 

 ' Crania typica/ have a very different, greatly elongated 

 form, and may be termed * oblong.' In this skull the 

 extreme length is to the extreme breadth as 100 to not more 

 than 67, and the transverse diameter of the human skull 

 may fall below even this proportion. People having such 

 skulls were called by Retzius ' dolichocephalic.' 



The most cursory glance at the side views of these two 

 skulls will suffice to prove that they differ, in another 

 respect, to a very striking extent. The profile of the face 

 of the Calmuck is almost vertical, the facial bones being 

 thrown downwards and under the forepart of the skull. 

 The profile of the face of the Negro, on the other hand, 

 is singularly inclined, the front part of the jaws projecting 

 far forward beyond the level of the fore part of the skull. 

 In the former case the skull is said to be ' orthognathous ' 

 or straight-jawed ; in the latter, it is called ' prognathous,' 

 a term which has been rendered, with more force than 

 elegance, by the Saxon equivalent, ' snouty.' 



Various methods have been devised in order to express 

 with some accuracy the degree of prognathism or ortho- 

 gnathism of any given skull ; most of these methods being 

 essentially modifications of that devised by Peter Camper, 

 in order to attain what he called the ' facial angle.' 



But a little consideration will show that any ' facial 

 angle ' that has been devised, can be competent to express 

 the structural modifications involved in prognathism and 

 orthognathism, only in a rough and general sort of way. 

 For the lines, the intersection of which forms the facial 

 angle, are drawn through points of the skull, the position 

 of each of which is modified by a number of circum- 

 stances, so that the angle obtained is a complex resultant 

 of all these circumstances, and is not the expression of 

 any one definite organic relation of the parts of the skull. 



I have arrived at the conviction that no comparison of 

 crania is worth very much, that is not founded upon the 

 establishment of a relatively fixed base line, to which the 

 measurements, in all cases, must be referred. Nor do I 

 think it is a very difficult matter to decide what that base 

 line should be. The parts of the skull, like those of the 

 66 K 



