330 ON SOME FOSSIL REMAINS OF MAN 



derthal skull, both reduced to one-third of the size of nature. 

 A small additional amount of flattening and lengthening, 

 with a corresponding increase of the supraciliary ridge, 

 would convert the Australian brain case into a form identical 

 with that of the aberrant fossil. 



And now, to return to the fossil skulls, and to the rank 

 which they occupy among, or beyond, these existing 

 varieties of cranial conformation. In the first place, I 



FIG. 30. An Australian skull from Western Porf, In the Museum of the 

 Royal College of Surgeons, with the contour of the Neanderthal 

 skull. Both reduced to one-third the natural size. 



must remark, that, as Professor Schmerling well observed 

 (supra, p. 300) in commenting upon the Engis skull, the 

 formation of a safe judgment upon the question is greatly 

 hindered by the absence of the jaws from both the crania, 

 so that there is no means of deciding, with certainty, whether 

 they were more or less prognathous than the lower existing 

 races of mankind. And yet, as we have seen, it is more in 

 this respect than any other, that human skulls vary, towards 

 and from, the brutal type the brain case of an average 

 dolichocephalic European differing far less from that of a 

 Negro, for example, than his jaws do. In the absence of the 

 jaws, then, any judgment on the relations of the fossil skulls 

 to recent Races must be accepted with a certain reservation, 



