664 GENERAL REMARKS 



intended to be implied by the application of Professor Cleland's 

 expressive epithet ' ill-filled ;' I may here add that a good rationale 

 of most of them, such for example as their wall-sidedness, their 

 retention of the prominence of frontal and parietal tubera, and the 

 stops on either side of their sagittal vertical line, is given in the 

 metaphysical expression ' the retention of an infantile type,' which 

 refers us to causes such as scarcity of food which arrested potential 

 growth. The fact that the dimensions of the parietal bones are 

 usually less affected by any general stunting to which skulls may 

 have been subjected than those of either frontal or occipital is a 

 very striking illustration of this, it being well known that the two 

 latter factors of the brain-case attain their normal relation to 

 the parietal only after several years of childhood with its numerous 

 liabilities to disease and distress have passed away. None, how- 

 ever, of these prehistoric skulls have exhibited that extreme 

 lowness and smallness and precoronal depression of the frontal 

 bone which is seen in some of the skulls from the ISIelanesian 

 Islands and Australia, though in some of the hypsistemo-cephali 

 of the long barrows we do observe that relatively greater pro- 

 minence of some one segment in the anterior half of the parietal 

 in the sagittal line which is often observable in skulls of this kind 

 (see Dr. B. Davis, Natuurkund. Verhand. Haarlem 1866, Deel 24, 

 PI. i. fig. i ; Busk, Anthrop. Instit. vi. 3, Jan. 1877, PL ix-xii). 



The small skulls of which I am speaking are sometimes, and 

 especially when belonging to males of the brachy-cephalic type, of 

 considerable textural solidity^, but I incline to think that it is more 



X. Band, ii. Abtheil. 1868, pp. 448, 450, 495 ; or " Separat Abdi-uck," pp. 58, 60, 105, 

 Tafel X. fig. 7), speaks of certain fissures, without any well-defined chai-acter, which 

 appear on the boundary between the parietal and occipital lobes, and says that they 

 correspond to a " fissura occipitalis externa " which appears in the human foetus, but is 

 normally limited in duration to the seventh and eighth months of intra-uterine life. 

 Though brachy-cephalic skulls have not, as yet, been proved to have been found in 

 Great Britain in any primary interments in the baiTOWs of which I am writing, and 

 though brachy-cephalic skulls from the United Kingdom, and indeed, I am inclined 

 to think, from European countries generally, are ordinarily well- and not " ill-filled " 

 skulls, it may, nevertheless, be allowable to say here that the " brachy-cephalic angus- 

 tiores" (see Phil. Trans. 1870, p. 148), as Professor Cleland would call the brachy- 

 cephali of several other parts of the world, frequently present the depressions of 

 which I have been wTiting. An excellent instance of the postero-parietal inward 

 pinching of the skull-walls was furnished to me quite recently by a Maori skull 

 presented to the University Museum by Dr. Batt, the skull having a latitudinal index 

 of 79, and possessing also markedly the contour which induced Retzius to class the 

 Maoris as brachy-cephali.' Since WTiting as above, I have noted on both sides of the 

 brain of a Malay a depression which must have had a very considerable postero- 

 parietal depression of the cranial walls corresponding to it. 



' Such is the Ancient British Skull from Codford described by Dr. B. Davis, Cran. 



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