LANGTON WOLD. 207 



effected * novo succo osseo affluente et annitente ut vulnus claudat ' 

 takes only { paucos menses,' and in one case (2394) only two months. 

 Yet this process is one requiring more time than the process of 

 absorptive smoothing which is all we have signs of here. The 

 unclosed vacuities in the diploe show that the wound was never 

 healed, unless we are to suppose that the rootlets above mentioned 

 have removed away cleanly and entirely that glaze of bone which in 

 skulls so wounded is deposited over the injured area. The death of 

 the man therefore, though occurring within a comparatively short 

 time from the receiving of this wound, must have been due to some 

 other cause than the mere wound itself. 



In the occipital norma the wall-sidedness of the lateral boundaries 

 of the pentagon described by the contour lines in this aspect and 

 the vertical carination characteristic of male skulls of this type are 

 eminently noteworthy \ 



1 A female skull, ' Langton Wold ii,' very closely resembling the one just described, 

 has been obtained from the same barrow. It belonged however to a very much older 

 individual, and some of the characteristics of its sex, which was established mainly 

 by an examination of its trunk and limb bones, have been, as female cranial cha- 

 racters sometimes are, masked by the inroads of senile changes. It is interesting to 

 note that the femora of this aged woman resembled those of this young male subject 

 and those of the young woman next to be described, in having the spiral line joining 

 the linea aspera and the anterior intertrochanteric line well marked. The aged 

 female skull, ' Langton, ii. 2,' differs from both the others with which it has been 

 compared in retaining the prominence of the parietal tubera so commonly observable 

 in skulls up to the time when, with the evolution of the second set of teeth, the lower 

 part of the skull widens out with the widening of the jaws. The absence of 

 prominence of the region of the parietal tuberosities is one of the characters 

 given by His and Riitimeyer as characteristic of the Hohberg type, an undoubtedly 

 old form of skull ; the presence of such prominence, on the other hand, is given 

 by Schaafhausen (' Die Urform des menschlichen Schadels,' p. 7) as characteristic 

 of priscan skulls. A consideration of these three skulls, taken together with that 

 of some of the facts of skull-development, will show how these statements may 

 be reconciled. The parietal tuberosities are as distinctively characteristic of 

 the human cranium as is the lobule of the marginal convolution called 'lobulus 

 tuberis' by Huschke (' Schaedel, Hirn, und Seele,' p. 142, 1854); the full distance 

 between them (135 mill.) however, within some three millimeters, is attained to as 

 early as ten years of age. See Welcker, ' Wachsthum und Bau,' p. 127. They are 

 prominent in the skulls of quite young human subjects even of savage races, as e.g. 

 the Australians and Indian Coles (see skulls mentioned in note on p. 214 infra), whilst 

 on the other hand they are only very faintly indicated in the skulls even of the anthropo- 

 morphous apes. Further, it is, as might have been expected, a fact (see Weisbach, 

 ■ Archiv fur Anthropologic,' iii. p. 71) that the intertuberal diameter is identical for the 

 two sexes, or nearly so. It is now easy to see how female skulls which fail to attain 

 the ' rounding out of the sides of the skull which occurs from the latest expansion of 

 the brain' (see Cleland, 'Phil. Trans.' 1870, p. 149), and which retain in this particular 



