0.6 The Primitive Inhabitants 



rent, and much compressed by the heavy winter ice of 



the quaternary period, so that human bones might well 



have been destroved ; and, besides, that the Swiss lakes 



and Danish shell heaps were almost devoid of human 



bones. But, finally, at the meeting of the Societe 



d'Anthropologie, of 13th August, 1864, M. Boucher de 



Perthes announced that he had found fragments of hu- 

 es 



man bones, representing all ages. Remembering the 

 captiousness which had met his former statements, he 

 had persuaded the mayor and several of the leading men 

 of Abbeville to accompany him to the excavations, 

 stand by the workmen as they dug, and receive with 

 their own hands the human fragments from their bed as 

 they were reached. 



Of all the relics found, no others have excited so 

 much interest as the human skulls — one found in the 

 cave of Neanderthal, near Dusseldorf; the other in the 

 cave of Engis, in Belgium. The Neanderthal skull 

 has given rise to unusual discussion. The brain capac- 

 ity, seventy-five cubic inches, is verv near an average 

 between a Hindoo and the largest known healthy 

 European skull. But while the brain capacity is so 

 near an average, the shape and formation are the most 

 brutal of any known human skull. The extraordinary 

 prominence of the superciliary arches, the unparalleled 

 flattening of both the forehead and the occiput, and the 

 straightness of the sutures, make this the most ape-like 

 of human skulls. Learned men who claim to know, 

 say it bears no marks of having been the skull of an 

 idiot, and no marks of artificial compression. The 

 rest of the skeleton has nothing peculiar. The stout- 



