66 OX THE INTERMENTS OF PRIMITIVE MAN. 



It is not necessary to mention all the places in which 

 the osteological proofs of primeval men have been dis- 

 covered. One or two may be instanced. The skeleton 

 met with in the cave of Cro-Magnon, in the valley of the 

 Vezere, in the south of France, is now in Paris. Also there 

 is another skeleton of a man in the same museum which 

 has been discovered in a cave near Mentone, in Italy. 

 I wish particularly to point out that both these skeletons 

 contradict the hypothesis of my late distinguished friend 

 Professor Retzius, who considered that the earliest in- 

 habitants of Europe were little people, had brachy- 

 cephalic skulls, and were by successive waves of fresh 

 comers driven westward, so that the present representa- 

 tives of these primeval people are the Basques, and the 

 Finns, and the Lapps. These cave skeletons are not 

 short, but actually tall, of nearly six feet in stature, and 

 their skulls are nearly dolichocephalic. A few years ago, 

 when the Neanderthal skull was discovered in a cave in 

 Germany, which could only be approached by climbing 

 up a perpendicular rock a considerable height, Professor 

 Huxley and some other such hypothetical reasoners greedily 

 caught hold of it to support their delusive notion, that 

 man is derived primarily from the anthropomorphous apes. 

 This skull was said to prove the truth of this dream, and 

 to come between the ape and man, in fact, to be the 

 long lost and the long and anxiously inquired for " missing 

 link." At that time I had the gratification to prove to 

 many men of science that the Neanderthal skull was 

 nothing more than a skull of anomalous development, 

 such as occasionally occurs among all human races, 

 even in Englishmen, and that so far from supporting 

 the doctrine of gradual development of brain and 

 mental power, it had a brain actually larger than the 

 general size of the brain in any of the civilized 



