•286 FORMS OF THE SKULL. 



Occipital dans V Homme et daiis les autres Animanx," in 

 the Memoirs of the Roycd Academy of Sciences for 1764, 

 contains the first attempt at any general remarks on the 

 subject ; and this, indeed, is more important in pointing 

 out the differences between the human structure and that 

 of animals, than in defining the characters of the skull in 

 the different races of mankind. Camper has attempted a 

 more general view, by means of his facial line and angle 

 already described (see Chap. IV.). But what he has said 

 cannot be considered even as approximating to a systematic 

 account of the national varieties of the skull. It is suffi- 

 ciently obvious, that his method is applicable to such 

 varieties only as differ from each other in the size and pro- 

 minence of the jaws; that it will not at all exhibit the 

 characters of tliose which vary in the opposite way, viz. in 

 the greater or less breadth of the face, while the upper, 

 posterior, and lateral aspects of the cranium are entirely 

 disregarded. It often happens, that crania of the most 

 different nations, which differ toto ccslo from each other on 

 the whole, have the same facial line ; and, on the contrary, 

 that skulls of the same nation, which agree in general cha- 

 racter, differ very much in the direction of this line *. 

 Camper could not, indeed, have fully explained this sub- 

 ject, because he had no sufficient collection of crania for the 

 purpose. His dissertation contains an engraving of a skull, 

 which he calls that of a Calmuck, and adduces as a repre- 

 sentative of all the natives of Asia. The characters of this 

 skull are completely Negro, and the very reverse of those 



♦ The crania of a Negro and of a Pole, represented in the Decades of Bi.u- 

 MENBACH {Dec. altera^ tab. x. Dec. tcrtia tab. xxW.) possess exactly the 

 same facial line ; yet the general character of the two skulls rs most opposite 

 when we compare the narrow and kccl-ehaped Ethiopian to the broad 

 square form of the Lltluianian. There are, in the same work, two Negro 

 crania of very different facial lines, which, when viewed in front, betray 

 their Ethiopic origin most incontcstaI)ly, by the same characters of a narrow 

 and compressed cranium and arched forehead. 



In short, this criterion of the facial line, which I have already shewn to be 

 quite insufticicnt as a key to the intellectual rank of animals, is equally, if 

 not more unserviceable, in its application to the varieties of man. 



