124 KELIQUL-E AQUITANIC^E. 



cerns the coexistence of the two types. It is clear that the Cave-dwellers of the 

 Stone Age, who fought the Elephant and Rhinoceros with their flint weapons, 

 are represented in their remains by two distinct races. This very thing leads me 

 to insist on a consideration arising from M. Pruner-Bey's Memoir. He informs 

 us that these old skulls would answer feature by feature to the description 

 of certain Esthonian skulls. At any rate it is not so with those which I have 

 received from St. Petersburg, and which are in the Museum of Natural History. 

 These are either brachycephalic or mesaticephalic ; not one approaches the well- 

 marked dolichocephalism of the skulls from Cro-Magnon. The skulls in our 

 Museum correspond plainly with the Esthonian skulls described by Von Baer 

 about 1816. They would also correspond in type to the crania (of the Reindeer 

 Age) found in Belgium by M. Dupont. I cannot have the least doubt about it 

 after the exclamation uttered by the latter on seeing the skulls I received from 

 St. Petersburg. It must be, then, that this little province of Esthonia possesses, 

 in the existing population, the two types indicated by the fossil human remains. 



I may add that of the three skulls in our Museum, one recalls essentially, by 

 the whole of its characters, the Mongolian and Chinese type; the bones are 

 robust, and the canine fossa is slightly marked. The other two (of which one at 

 least is more plainly brachycephalic) are distinguished by very different characters : 

 they are remarkable for their slenderness ; the canine fossa is deeply hollowed ; 

 the lower jaw of one of them reproduces nearly all the characters of the famous 

 jaw from the Moulin Quignon, and resembles it in particular by the premature 

 loss of the teeth. 



Everything, then, shows that the men who preceded us in Europe were already 

 divided into several races, as I have elsewhere indicated. 



It is evident, moreover, that the Cro-Magnon skulls introduce new elements 

 into the question of European origins, and oblige us to take up again some of 

 the questions already treated of by the Anthropological Society, particularly as to 

 the ethnic composition of the Basque populations. 



Before I finish I would ask my two colleagues permission to criticise some 

 observations they have made. Treating of certain characters, they have said that 

 some were a sign of inferiority, others of superiority. M. Broca has pointed out 

 the curve of a femur as furnishing a point of comparison between the Man whose 

 remains are before us and the Gorilla ; whilst M. Pruner-Bey says that a slight 

 degree of rickets suffered in infancy, and of which he believes he finds other 

 traces, has sufficed to account for this condition of the femur. M. Pruner-Bey, 

 however, sees a sign of inferiority in a faintly marked disposition of the parietal 



