UPON THE SERIES OF PREHISTORIC CRANIA. 675 



The most typically dolicho-cephalic modern race, not even ex- 

 cluding the Esquimaux, is beyond doubt the Australian. As was 

 pointed out long ago in the Osteological Catalogue of the Royal 

 College of Surgeons, vol. ii. p. 838, No. 5385, brachy-cephalic skulls 

 are to be found amongst Negro tribes, and (see p. 670 siipra) instances 

 may be found among Negro brains of excessive narrowness in the zone 

 of brain between the supra-marginal and the occipital convolutions, 

 though some of the most forwardly placed parietal tubera which I 

 have ever met with are from series of Caffre crania ; and thoughj 

 secondly, these tubera are sometimes baekwardly placed even in 

 dolicho-cephalic Negro heads. Confining ourselves therefore to the 

 consideration of the Australian cranium, which furnishes us with a 

 simple case, as its uniformity and also the degraded character of 

 the race are alike beyond dispute, we have to say that the parietal 

 eminences all but always occupy a relatively forward position in the 

 parietal bone and in the skull of the Australians ; and that to the un- 

 varying dolicho-cephaly of their brain the segments lying posteriorly 

 to the plane of the ' lobulus tuberis ' always contribute a quanti- 

 tatively large though not a qualitatively superior proportion. 

 Without going further into the controversy alluded to at pp. 

 646-647 siqjra, as to the relative suj)eriority of the dolicho-cephalic 

 or brachy-cephalic type, it may suffice to say here that not only 

 would the inferiorly irrigated and histologically inferior segments of 

 the modern European dolicho-cephali found in Germany, England, 

 and Ireland form a smaller proportion of the entire length of their 

 brains than, judging from their skulls or from such casts as those 

 labelled 6 and 7 in the Museum of the College of Surgeons, the 

 homologous segments do in the Australian brain, but that the 

 anterior segments of the European brain are broader, with their 

 fissures therefore deeper, and their aggregate square area of grey 

 matter much more extensive than those of the Australian brain ; 

 the Europeans specified being dolicho-cephali latio7'es, and the 

 Australians dolicho-cej^hali angustiores. But the dolicho-cephalic 

 ' Silurian^ type which characterised the inhabitants of Great 

 Britain and Ireland, and of a very great part of Europe also, in the 

 stone age, included crania resembling the Australian in the points 

 of which we are speaking, for the long-barrow-builders were not 

 rarely ' dolicho-cephali angustiores ^.' 



1 If Schroder van der Kolk's calculation as to the extent o£ that difficultly measura- 

 ble area made up by the siu-face of the convolutions within and without tlie fissures 

 from the fissure of Rolando to the front of the brain in men of various degrees of 



X X 2 



