UPON THE SERIES OF PREHISTORIC CRANIA. 707 



nishing some evidence for the existence of the disease rickets in the 

 bronze period. Of the other five, one was found amongst more than 

 a hundred Peruvian crania obtained from the collections made by 

 Consul Hutchinson ; two came to me from among six lower jaws 

 collected for me in South Africa by the late Mr. Frank Gates of 

 Christ Church, the small size, low coronoids, and feeble chins of 

 which indicate that they probably belonged, as reported, to an 

 outcast tribe, probably Bushman ; a fourth belonged to a ' pure- 

 blooded Gond,' as guaranteed by the donor, Captain H. A. Ham- 

 mond, from Chindwara in Central India; the fifth, curiously enough 

 and also suggestively, belonged to one of the South Welsh skeletons 

 buried in the time of Charles I, as referred to above, pp. 565-566, 

 note. 



Pruner Bey (Bull. Soc. Anth. Paris, ser. ii. tom. ii. p. 244, 1867) 

 has recorded the discovery of a similarly bifid canine from the 

 famous cave-find of Naulette, in which, it may be added, evidence 

 of a lower-jaw wisdom tooth with quinquefid fangs, and of extremely 

 small incisors, was also found (ibid. tom. i. p. 587). The trans- 

 versely placed sockets of these fangs are very frequently represented 

 rudimentarily by raised ribs on the walls of undivided sockets, and 

 the same may be said of the sockets of the lower premolars, which 

 however I have never seen bifid, but which, judging from the 

 position of these raised ridges, would have had such double fangs 

 placed transversely to the jaw like those of the canines, not antero- 

 posteriorly like those of the molars behind them, or of their homo- 

 logues in Simiadse. 



If the importance of the fact of the greater relative frequency of 

 bifidity of the lower canine-fang in ' priscan ' races and modern 

 ' Naturvdlker' is plain enough, the same cannot be said of the inter- 

 pretation or signification of the fact. In none of the recent, nor, so 

 far as I can learn from plates, in any of the fossil Simiadse, has any 

 fission of the fang of a canine been observed ; indeed the lower-jaw 

 canines in this fauiily with their single fangs and the lower-jaw 

 premolars with their invariably double ones differ from their human 

 homologues more strikingly than do any of their other teeth. It 

 is true that in some even of the Cynomorphous Simiadae the fang 

 of the lower canine is laterally grooved as well as laterally com- 

 pressed ; and in the gorilla the long diameter of the oval section of 

 this fang forms a much more widely open angle mesially with the 

 long axis of the molar series than it does in the chimpanzee or 

 orang. Still these are but approximations to what is fully carried 



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