UPON THE SERIES OF PREHISTOiaC CRANIA. 687 



broken surfaces in its vault ; in the skulls on which Dr. Thurnam 

 bases his inferences ' the angular fragments are so numerous that 

 one might suppose the gashes had been inflicted in sheer wan- 

 tonness/ Cran. Brit., pi. 59 \ 



Now I submit that the principle of least action is at least as 

 likely to have regulated the proceedings of ancient as of modern 

 manslayers, and that the very fact of these ancient skulls being 

 broken into such a multitude of fragments, a comminution which 

 would have entailed an amount of trouble as purposeless in the 

 eyes of those who would have had to go through it as it is repulsive 

 in ours^ is a prima facie improbability of the very first magnitude 

 against the interpretation in question. 



Leaving purely quantitative considerations and coming to the 

 character of the fractures in each of the two sets of skulls, I have 

 in the second place to say that the broken surfaces in the skull 

 fragments described by Dr. Thurnam are, in spite of the very con- 

 siderable variety which is observable in skull-surfaces, howsoever 

 and whensoever fractured, very different as a whole from those of 

 skulls which we positively know to have been cut into and through 

 during life or immediately after death. It is true that the cut 

 surfaces described by Dr. Thurnam may have a ' clean ' and ' por- 

 cellanous ' appearance ; but in answer to this I have to say, firstly, 

 that I have seen perfectly similar surfaces produced in the very old 

 and altered skulls in question by accidental falls or impact or pres- 

 sure ; and that it was an occurrence of this kind happening in the 

 case of a skull-bone from the cremation long barrow at Market 



* A nearly equally valuable standard of comparison is furnished to us by the figures 

 and description of chopped horses' bones given by Professor Engelhardt in his ' Den- 

 mark in the Early Iron Age/ pp. 70-71 (Eng. Trans. 1866). Of two of the skulls of 

 these horses it is said that the incisions upon them are ' both deep and numerous,' one 

 of them showing as many as six, the other as many as ten different cuts. The skulls 

 from the long barrows are, unhappily for the interests of reconstruction, broken into 

 much more numerous fragments ; and Professor Steenstrup does not believe that the 

 horse-bones in question were so cut while the animals were living, or had their flesh 

 upon them ; for ' a minutely-splintered fracture has been produced by the chip having 

 been broken away from the bone by a vigorous twist of the sword, leaving a smooth 

 sharply-cut surface ; and this circumstance seems to indicate that these violent blows 

 had been inflicted when the bones were no longer covered by flesh ; for, if the flesh 

 had still been on the bones, these loould frohahly have presented a more jagged or 

 roughly splintered fracture.' The words in italics relate to a state of things quite 

 different from that quite correctly described by Dr. Thurnam (Principal Forms of 

 Ancient British and Gaulish Skulls, 1865, p. 70) as presenting us with * the edges 

 of the divided bones perfectly sharp and clean, and the fragments themselves having 

 a porcellanous character.' The reference to Engelhardt 's work I owe to John Evans, 

 Esq., F.R.S. 



