588 DESCRIPTION OP FIGURES OF SKULLS. 



Schweizer Allien for 1864, p. 398) bestow upon the better developed 

 skulls of their ' Sion Typus ;' though it belongs to the class of skull 

 assigned by those anthropologists to their « Disentis TypusJ The 

 skull as a whole is sub-quadrate or sub-cubical in outline, but being 

 filled out in each individual region it gains an appearance of 

 general smoothness and globosity. The supraciliary ridges are less 

 in size and the forehead is less oblique than is at all usual in skulls 

 of this period which belonged to owners of such strength as the 

 powerful and well-defined lower jaw speaks to. The point of maxi- 

 mum height when the skull is in its normal position lies a little 

 way behind the coronal suture ; and by the greatness of this h eighty 

 both absolute and relative, and by its situation at this point, one of 

 the most characteristic features of this type of skull is constituted. 

 In this the ancient British brachy-cephali resemble the neolithic 

 Danes, as pointed out by Professor Busk ^. 



The occipital squama occupies a plane a little posterior to that 

 occupied by the posterior half of the parietals, as is the case in some 

 of the brachy- cephalic skulls just referred to and others : the occipital 

 protuberance having been lost, together with a large part of the 

 occipital bone, it is not now possible to say with safety whether the 

 fronto-inial line was or was not shorter than the fronto-postremal. 

 The cerebral overlap however has certainly been considerable, and 

 the conceptacula cerebelli are more horizontal than is usual in 

 skulls of this type. This however may be partly due to the commence- 

 ment of senile gravitation^ changes. The posterior part of the 

 parietals show the normal brachy -cephalic perpendicularity, the small 

 foramina emissaria, not seen in the drawing, being entirely on the 

 posterior aspect of the skull. In spite of the very considerable frontal 

 width the zygomatic arch still comes into view in the noryna verticalis, 

 and this width, together with that of the interangular diameter of the 

 lower jaw, must have given the face a marked expression of strength 

 during life. The sockets of the canine give a square outline to the 

 front of the upper jaw. The norma occipitalis, like the norma verti- 

 calis, is remarkable for the rounding oiF of its outstanding angles. 

 Skulls strikingly similar to this, both in contour and measurements, 

 are to be found in modern European races, e.g. in the Orisons^ 

 amongst the Roumansch-speaking populations, for a specimen of 



^ See Journal of the Ethnological Society, p. 468, Jan. 1871. 

 ^ See Cleland, Phil. Trans., 1870, pp. 136-137. 



^ For a memoir on the population of the Grisons, see V. Baer, Bull. Acad. Imp. des 

 Sciences St. Petersburg, p. 38 seqq., 1860. 



