UPON THE SEEIES OF PREHISTOKIC CRANIA. 6G5 



usual to find their ill-nourished character expressed by a slighter 

 structure and a lesser relative weight as well as by their smaller 

 dimensions. As I have already hinted (see pp. 589 and 640 s?(j)ra), 

 I am inclined to think that it may have been the mal-nutrition 

 of such skulls as these which gave origin to the hypothesis of a 

 Lapp population having existed in prehistoric times in Denmark, 

 South Sweden, and in these islands. Latitudes much further south 

 than Great Britain went undoubtedly through a reindeer period, but, 

 without questioning this, we can stoj) short of averring that the 

 men who domesticated these animals in prehistoric Southern 

 Europe were of the same stock as the men who domesticate them 

 now in Northern Europe. The skulls of the modern Lapps do not 

 closely resemble either the stone and bone period skulls, or our 

 bronze period skulls ; neither of these periods coincided with the 

 reindeer period, whilst in both of them small stunted crania are 

 found mixed up with large ones, and that too in the tombs ' of the 

 kings ^.' 



To obtain however any really satisfactory rationale of the difference 

 between brachy-cephaly and dolicho-cephaly we must go beyond 

 examination simply of the texture, relative proportion, and capacity 



Brit., pi. 14, as being ' dense in its sti'ucture and rather heavy ; ' and such are a con- 

 siderable number of skulls of the Romano-British period described by me as found 

 at Frilford, Ai-chseologia, xlii. p. 458. 



' A considerable amount of discussion upon the subject of the Lapp hypothesis took 

 place at the Meeting of the International Congress of Prehistoric Anthropology and 

 Ai'chfeology held at Stockholm in 1874 ; the opinions of the following authors, mostly 

 in disfavour of the hypothesis, will be found at the pages of the Compte Rendu of 

 the Congress (published last year, 1876) which I append to their names : — Rygh, pp. 

 178-179; Montelius, p. 194 ; Worsaae, p. 208 ; Gustav Retzius, pp 231-233 ; Schaaf- 

 hausen, p.811 ; Virchow, p. 848 ; Baron von Dtiben's views, pp. 691-692, have already 

 been quoted, p. 629 supra, and the following extract from Mr. Smiles' 'Life of a Scotch 

 Naturalist, Thomas Edward,' 1876, p. 357, looks a little strange when compared with 

 it : 'It is probable that a great part of Europe was originally peopled by Lapps, and 

 that they were driven N^orth by the incoming of a more civilised race from the East. 

 There are still remnants of the Lapps in the island of Malmon off the coast of Sweden, 

 in North Coimaught, and the Island of Aran in Ireland ; in the Island of Lewis 

 off the Western Coast of Scotland, and in several of the Shetland Islands.' 



So far as I know. Professor Nilsson's (Skandinaviska Noi'dens Ur-invanare, Lund 

 1838-1843, Hft. 3, p. 12) and Professor Rask's names are connected with the 

 origination of this hypothesis. The views of the former of these authors appear to 

 have been considerably modified in the thirty years' interval between 1838 and the 

 publication of an English translation of his work under the editoi-ship of Sir John 

 Lubbock (see p. 122 of this translation). 



The views of the elder Retzius may be seen in Mnller's Archiv, 1845, or Ethnolo- 

 gische Schriften, 1864, p. 20; and Miiller's Archiv, 1849, and Ethn. Schriften,p. 102. 

 The small skulls described by Retzius, from Marly and Meudon near Versailles 

 (Miiller's Archiv, 1847, p. 499, and Ethn. Schriften, pp. 62 64>, furnish instances 

 of stunted skulls the existence of which can be explained as in the text. 



