210 DESCRIPTION OF FIGURES OF SKULLS. 



is situated a little higher up than in the preceding skull, and 

 the mesial vertical carina is less clear in the occipital pentagon. 

 But it resembles that skull in the faintly marked parietal tuhera 

 and the absence of any rounding out of the lateral cranial walls 

 below the level of those eminences. Viewed from above this skull 

 presents a somewhat more tapering outline in both directions, both 

 towards the forehead and towards the occiput, than the preceding 

 one, and would have been more phaenozygous if the zygomatic 

 arches had not been extensively lost. The sagittal and coronal 

 sutures are more extensively obliterated than in the preceding 

 skull, and the lambdoid, which was unaffected in that skull, is 

 largely obliterated in this. There is a depression in the region of 

 the left lateral fontanelle, the spot called { asterion ' by Professor 

 Broca, and the maximum occipital width is half an inch less than 

 in the other skull with which it has been compared. These points 

 and the closure of the lambdoid may suggest that the occipital 

 lobes ceased to grow early in life; their length however must 

 have been great. In the norma basalis the absence of any crista 

 transversa occipitis enables us to give a more favourable measure- 

 ment to the fronto - postremal as compared with the frontal -inial 

 diameter of the skull than in skulls where the commencement of 

 the linea nuchae mediana is masked by a large development of that 

 outgrowth. The palate is deep ; the external alveolar border of the 

 upper jaw is ellipsoidal ; the disproportionate smallness of the upper 

 wisdom teeth gives the inner border of the dental series a parabolic 

 outline. There is a spot of caries on the right wisdom tooth in the 

 lower jaw. The absence of any occipital spine enables us to see 

 the distinctness of the curves described by the superior squama from 

 those of the parietal above and the conceptacula cerebelli below, 

 and produces the ' facettirte Absetzung des Hinterkopfs ' dwelt 

 upon as characteristic of the Hohberg type of skull. The absence 

 of the process in question is however rather a sexual than an 

 ethnographical difference ; but it enables us to see the peculiar 

 conformation of the back-head which is common to both sexes to 

 great advantage. 



