214 DESCRIPTION OF FIGURES OF SKULLS. 



The elongated oval contour of the vertical norma and the penta- 

 gonal of the occipital are very characteristic. In the frontal norma 

 the great relative development of the alveolar, as opposed to the 

 mental portion of the front of the lower jaw, is very striking. In 

 this,, as also in the backward position of its foramen mentale in a plane 

 corresponding to that of the last premolar, this lower jaw resembles 

 many other lower jaws of skulls of this period. It is however a 

 larger and powerful bone, as, it must be said l , many lower jaws 

 from very early burials have been found to be. The canines are 

 greatly developed in both jaws, and give a squareness to the lower 

 part of the face. There has been much decay of the teeth, and 

 alveolar abscesses with the left upper premolars and wisdom tooth. 



above than the skull from Norton Bavant, adduced in favour of that view by Dr, 

 Thurnam *, in which the spheno-basilar suture was still open. 



Four other dolichocephalic skulls were obtained from the same barrow of Upper 

 Swell, in which the sagittal suture was patent, though they had belonged to as old or 

 older individuals, but in them the parietal arc though long is not so long as in the one 

 spoken of above. The same remark applies to some adult Eskimo skulls in the Oxford 

 University Museum ; and two skulls in the Oxford University Museum (representative 

 of two other races in which the boat-shape, denoted by the title ' Scaphocephaly ' or 

 ' Cymbocephalic,' is very eminently and very frequently represented, the Australian, 

 namely, and the Coles of India), the elder of the owners of which cannot have attained 

 more than sixteen years of age, whilst the younger was only ten years old, have each 

 attained that shape with every suture patent throughout. In like manner the Gentoo 

 skull, No. 5558 in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, with every 

 suture open, is all but identical in its outlines with the Gentoo skull 5556, which is 

 1 synostotic.' Per contra, in brachycephalic skulls of the Bronze as of other periods 

 the coronal suture is far too frequently open throughout to allow us to suppose that 

 its synostosis has, when present, been the cause of the skull's shortness. 



1 Though the lower jaw figured with an ancient British skull from a barrow at 

 West Kennet, North Wilts, pi. 50, ' Crania Britannica,' and stated by Dr. Thurnam, 

 in loco, ' to deviate considerably from the normal type,' does, as I convinced myself 

 by an examination of it in the Cambridge University Museum, most undoubtedly 

 belong to some quite modern skull, still similarly powerful jaws have not rarely been 

 found with very ancient skulls. Such were the lower jaws found by Schmerling in 

 the Engis Cave, see Virchow, ' Archiv fur Anthrop.,' vol. vi. p. 90 ; and in the cairn of 

 Get, Caithness, as recorded by C. Carter Blake, Esq., ' Mem. Anth. Soc.,' vol. iii. p. 243. 



* See 'Mem. Soc. Anth. London,' vol. iii, or 'Further Researches,' separate copy, 

 p. 31. Also ibid., vol. i, separate copy, p. 69 ; and ' Nat. Hist. Review,' p. 242, 1865 ; 

 and Virchow, 'Archiv fiir Anthropologic,' vol. v. p. 535, 1872. 



