GENEEAL EEMARKS UPON THE SERIES OF 

 PREHISTORIC CRANIA. 



A LARGE series of skulls from prehistoric burial-places in the 

 north of England, and chiefly in the East Riding of Yorkshire, 

 having, together with many others from other localities, been pre- 

 sented to the Oxford University Museum by the Rev. William 

 Greenwell, F.SA., I undertook to select a certain number of these 

 skulls for figuring and description. There is room for the addition 

 of some general remarks to the account contained in the preceding 

 pages 559-623 of the craniography of the skulls thus selected, 

 a considerable quantity of additional material having come into our 

 hands during the time which has elapsed since the commencement 

 of this work. 



A craniographer with Canon Greenwell's series before his eyes 

 in a coiqj-cVoiil view would be impressed wdth the fact that out of 

 the series, two sets, the one by its length typically illustrative of the 

 dolicho-cephalic, the other by its breadth as typically illustrative 

 of the brachy-cephalic form of skull, could at once be selected, 

 even by a person devoid of any special anatomical knowledge. An 

 antiquary similarly inspecting this series with a knowledge of its 

 archseological history would, if he separated it into two groups, the 

 one containing all the skulls of the stone and bone age, the other 

 containing all those of the bronze period, perceive that, while the 

 latter group comprised both dolicho-cephalic and brachy-cephalic 

 crania and in very nearly equal proportions, none but dolicho- 

 cephalic skulls were to be found in any set of skulls from the barrows 

 of the premetallic period \ 



^ Sir Win. Wilde, in a lecture on the Ethnology of the Ancient Irish, delivered 

 at the College of Physicians in 1844 and originally published in the Dublin 

 Literary Journal, promulgated the idea that two races, one dolicho-cephalic, the other 

 a round or globular beaded race, existed in that country in the earliest times, apparently 

 simultaneously. Examples of both races, but especially of the former, he thought were 

 still to be found among the modern Irish. The evidence before Sir Wui. Wilde is 



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