RUDSTONE. 191 



down of that region as it follows after the retreating brain, but the 

 brachycephalic form with retreating and low forehead is recognis- 

 able in quite young skulls both of early, as in the case of the ' Hesler- 

 ton Wold Hall Grave' skull already described, and of present times. 

 Other senile changes are beginning to show 7 themselves in this 

 skull in the way of loss of compactness of tissue and consequently 

 of gloss and smoothness on the external surface, in the very 

 extensive obliteration of sutures even in the external table of the 

 skull, a condition less frequently observed in brachycephalic than in 

 dolichocephalic skulls, and in the wearing down of the teeth to an 

 extent which, in an ill-nourished 1 individual, would have produced 

 alveolar abscesses. The conceptacula cerebelli are larger relatively 

 to the space occupied by the superior squama occipitis in this than 

 in most skulls, and the occipital protuberance is very considerably 

 developed and devoid of any traces of division into lineae superiores 

 and lineae supremae, as, Von Baer 2 observes, is usually the case when 



and is found closely adherent, as in infancy, to the dura mater. In such cases the grooves 

 for the meningeal arteries appear to be deeply sunken into the substance of the skull, 

 having been in reality converted into deeper channels, or even tubes, by the upgrowth 

 of bone around them. This was the case in the body of a man supposed to be 106 

 years old examined by me, as recorded in the 'British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical 

 Review,' p. 508, April 1 863 (Article XII, p. 141 of this volume). A skull of a very aged 

 person may under such circumstances attain a thickness of as much as 15 millimetres, 

 forming thereby a striking contrast to equally senile skulls in which the cranial walls 

 may have been reduced to paper-thinness or actual fenestration by atrophy. 



In a third class of cases the retreating brain is followed up by the skull-walls ; and 

 especially in the frontal region is this concomitance of involution observable, both in 

 the living subject and in the skull, as has been noted by Lavater and Froriep, cited 

 by Cleland, ' Phil. Trans.' p. 136, 1870. In some of these cases the inner table of the 

 skull will thicken simultaneously with the gradual sinking down of the cranial 

 vault. In a skull of an aged man, probably a Roman officer, eminently dolicho- 

 cephalic, forwarded to me by the Rev. W. Lukis, F.S.A., from Wath, near Ripon, 

 I find, coincidently with an extraordinary obliquity of the os frontis, two raised 

 areae, covering a space of a little more than an inch square on each side, as though 

 they were growing down into the space vacated by the atrophying frontal convolutions. 

 Some of the appearances which have been dwelt upon as characteristic of ' Neander- 

 thaloid ' crania are, I am well assured, to be ascribed to these purely physiological, 

 though senile, changes of form, and have absolutely no ethnological significance 

 whatever, except in so far as the texture of brachycephalic crania is usually stouter 

 and more resistent to gravitation changes than is that of the dolichocephalic, 

 amongst which most of the skulls just mentioned are to be classed. 



1 See J. Mummery, On the Relations of Dental Caries in Aboriginal Races. ' Trans. 

 Odont. Soc.' Nov. 1869. 



2 ' Crania Selecta,' Mem. Acad. Imp. Sci. St. Pe"tersbourg, Ser. vi. torn. viii. 185. His 

 words are, ' Cristam (transversam occipitis) in pluriinis hominibus in binos arcus 



