RUDSTONE. 195 



Professor Busk has, loc. infra cit, felicitously suggested the 

 restoration of the Linnaean term ' plagiocephalic ' to this strongly 



from its very close resemblance to the Oregon, Peruvian, and other a ntero- posteriorly 

 compressed skulls which we know as a matter of fact to have been so treated, and 

 which we see to be as free, if they be skulls of aged individuals, from any traces of 

 the severe treatment they underwent in the first two years of life, as in the skull now 

 before us. It is obvious, whatever may be said to the contrary, that a deformation 

 which goes so far as materially to alter the relative proportions of the several lobes of 

 the brain to each other without materially altering the anatomical relation of those 

 lobes to the skull bones covering them, which M. Broca has (' Bulletin de la Society 

 d' Anthropologic,' 1870, p. 115) shown that the 'Deformation Toulonnaise' actually 

 does, must be put in play in these early days. For of the 22 inches or so ( = 555 mm.) 

 which may be taken (Bischoff, * Sitzungsberichte k. bayer. Akad. Wiss. Miinchen,' 

 1864, Bd. i. p. 39) as the average head circumference of a living male adult, no less, 

 but a little more, than nineteen inches and a half ( = 500 mm. = 19.685") have been 

 shown by Liharzig (' Gesetz des Wachsthums,' 1862, p. 17, Taf. 5) to be attained by 

 the male child of twenty-one months old. And between twenty-one months and the 

 age to which the owner of such a skull as this must have attained, abundant time 

 would have been afforded for smoothing down, rounding off, and removing any such 

 traces of the action of any deforming apparatus as are sometimes to be seen in younger 

 skulls (e.g. in a skull from Vancouver's Island, No. 826 a. Oxford Museum) which 

 have been subjected to it. Further, the fact that in a country so near as France 

 a practice of depressing the head has lasted in Normandy (Retzius, ' Ethnograph. 

 Schriften,' p. 130) and in the non-Iberian parts of Southern France (Foville, cit. 

 Retzius, I.e.) even into our own days, — and in the Tolosan portion of this latter dis- 

 trict has been supposed (see Broca, 1. c.) to have been a survival of the practice of the 

 Tectosages, — may make us hesitate before definitely refusing, as so many other writers 

 from the times of Haller (cit. Blumenbach, ' De Gen. Hum. Var. Nat.,' 1. c.) down to that 

 of Virchow (see ' Congres Internat. d' Anthropologic,' 1876, torn. i. p. 318) have refused, 

 to accept artificial deformation as the explanation of the conformation of a particular 

 skull, whether it be plagiocephalic as this skull, or annularly constricted like the 

 well-known Avar skulls of Grafenegg and Atzgersdorff. It must however be said, on 

 the other hand, that both these forms of skull, though now well known to be pro- 

 ducible artificially, do yet arise spontaneously even in our own day ; and it is here 

 suggested that unless a considerable number of skulls of one or other or both of these 

 forms are found together it is unsafe to assert, in the absence of still persistent marks 

 of the action of a compressing or constricting apparatus, that any single skull has been 

 artificially deformed. For in most cases in which we have undoubted evidence of 

 the existence of this practice, skulls of both forms, the plagiocephalic, in which the 

 skull has been compressed from before backwards, and the annularly constricted and 

 elongated form illustrated by the Avar skulls above-mentioned and described by many 

 of the authors enumerated below, have been found together : and in spite of the 

 tendency shown by many writers to make multitudinous divisions of artificial cranial 

 deformities, it is plain from a consideration of the history of the rapid growth 

 of the brain and of the restlessness of children in early life, that it must be ex- 

 ceedingly difficult to prevent, with whatever care and whatever apparatus, the 

 plagiocephalic form from lapsing into the annularly constricted form. A com- 

 parison of the account given by M. Dumoutier of the practice (' Bull. Soc. Ethnograph. 

 de Paris,' vol. i. 1847, cit. Gosse, I.e. p. 154) as carried on in Patagonia with 

 the description given by Professor Huxley of a skull brought from Gregory Bay. 



O % 



