CRO-MAGNON SKULLS AND BONES. 107 



would have been without the disease. Adults that have been rachitic are nearly always short; this 

 shortening has relation to the duration of the disease, and it is always very considerable when the malady 

 has lasted long enough to deform the bones. If the tibias from Cro-Magnon had really been deformed by 

 Rickets, the disease must have lasted long ; and we ought to have found the bones of the " Old Man," 

 particularly those of his lower limbs, decidedly stunted and misgrown. Instead of this, these bones are 

 enormous, and indicate a stature that M. Pruner-Bey himself estimates as having been not under six feet. 

 There is no example of a rickety person having attained such a size. This is the first fact incompatible 

 with the hypothesis under consideration. 



M. Pruner-Bey thinks with some reason that a rachitism capable of deforming the bones ought to leave 

 in their tissue, after recovery, apparent traces of its occurrence ; and, in accordance, he points out indeed at 

 several points of the skeleton, principally on the posterior extremity of the metatarsal bones, roughnesses 

 more or less coarse, which he takes for traces of the disease (see above, page 84). In the same manner he 

 interprets the excessive prominence of some lines giving insertion to aponeuroses or aponeurotic tendons &c. 

 All these so-called traces of Rickets, however, far from dating from infancy, are due to old age. In very 

 many old people the muscles and bones become atrophied ; but in robust old men we habitually see, instead 

 of this decadence of the bones, a manifest tendency to the ossification of the ligamentous, tendinous, and 

 aponeurotic fibres inserted directly in the bone. I have many a time, when Surgeon to the Hospital for 

 Old Men (Bicetre), had occasion to study these effects, well known to all anatomists as senile ossification. 

 Indeed they are often more strongly marked than in the Old Man from Cro-Magnon, and never bear any 

 resemblance to the effects of Rickets. 



M. Pruner-Bey, however, has had reason to believe that Rickets leaves a recognizable imprint, in the 

 bony tissue, even after complete recovery; for this takes place by condensation, as technically expressed; 

 and the reparative bony matter being disposed among the lamellae, and filling all the interstices and pores, 

 the surface of the bone becomes quite smooth, and appears less vascular than in the normal state. The 

 bone itself has become harder, more massive, almost like ivory ; the walls are thickened, the medullary 

 cavity narrowed. There is nothing like this in the bones from Cro-Magnon: their weight, internal 

 structure, and vascularity are altogether of the ordinary kind. When the cure of Rickets is not followed 

 by the process of condensation the bone remains less dense and more vascular than in its normal state ; 

 often indeed we find here and there porosities comparable to those of rarifying osteitis. None of these or of 

 other alterations from disease exist in the tibias from Cro-Magnon ; and therefore they have never been rachitic. 

 I venture to say that the idea of regarding the athletic Old Man of Cro-Magpon as a rickety subject could 

 not have occurred to any one had it not been that a pathological explanation of the compression of the 

 tibias was required to do away with the importance that comparative anatomy gives to this peculiar feature 

 in the tibias of the Old Man. Rickets often induces a flattening of the tibia, giving it the form of a sabre- 

 blade, convex or concave ; but it is enough to examine rachitic tibias in any museum to be certain that 

 they differ very much both from the tibias of Cro-Magnon and those of the ordinary triangular shape. 

 The difference is so great, characteristic, and complete, that it strikes the eye at first sight. 



In the first place, the flattening of rickety tibias always results from their curvature ; a tibia remaining 

 straight is never flattened ; and, from the nature of the organic process causing the flattening, it is impossible 

 that it should. I cannot here enter into the details of this elementary point in pathological anatomy and 

 physiology ; but I am sure that no competent person will contradict me when I affirm that the rectilineal 

 conformation of the tibias from Cro-Magnon proves that they have not been flattened by rickets. 



In the second place, rachitic deformity of the tibia is never limited to the upper part of the bone. It is 

 in the middle of the bone, sometimes even lower down, that the alteration is greatest, sometimes reaching 



