XVI. 



GENERAL REMARKS UPON THE PRECEDING 

 SERIES OF PREHISTORIC CRANIA FROM 

 'BRITISH BARROWS/ 



A large series of skulls from prehistoric burial-places in the 

 north of England, and chiefly in the East Riding of Yorkshire, 

 having, together with many others from other localities, been pre- 

 sented to the Oxford University Museum by the Rev. William 

 Green well, F.S.A., I undertook to select a certain number of these 

 skulls for figuring and description. There is room for the addition 

 of some general remarks to the account contained in the preceding 

 chapter of the craniography of the skulls thus selected, a con- 

 siderable quantity of additional material having come into our 

 hands during the time which has elapsed since the commencement 

 of this work. 



A craniographer with Canon Greenwell's series before his eyes 

 in a coup-cF ceil view would be impressed with the fact that out of 

 the series, two sets, the one by its length typically illustrative of the 

 dolichocephalic, the other by its breadth as typically illustrative 

 of the brachy cephalic form of skull, could at once be selected, 

 even by a person devoid of any special anatomical knowledge. An 

 antiquary similarly inspecting this series with a knowledge of its 

 archaeological history would, if he separated it into two groups, the 

 one containing all the skulls of the stone and bone age, the other 

 containing all those of the bronze period, perceive that, while the 

 latter group comprised both dolichocephalic and brachyceplialic 

 crania and in very nearly equal proportions, none but dolicho- 

 cephalic skulls were to be found in any set of skulls from the barrows 

 of the premetallic period *. 



1 Sir William Wilde, in a lecture on the Ethnology of the Ancient Irish, delivered 

 at the College of Physicians in 1844 and originally published in the 'Dublin 

 Literary Journal,' promulgated the idea that two races, one dolichocephalic, the other 



