248 GENERAL REMARKS 



were skulls of women. One of these was the woman (see ' Journ. 

 Anth. Inst.' vi. p. 36) found in one of the flint mines under the line 

 of the fosse round the British fort at Cissbuiy, which were shown 

 by Colonel Lane Fox ('Journ. Anth. Inst.' vol. v) to be of earlier 

 date than that fort, itself of the stone age. The second of these was 

 a woman's skull from the famous Rodmarton barrow, from the 

 collection of the late Rev. Canon Lysons (see 'Proc. Soc. Antiq/ 1863 ; 

 Thurnam, ' Crania Britannica,' PI. 59) ; and the third of these was the 

 skull of the single undisturbed skeleton found in the long barrow 

 'Upper Swell, ccxxxii,' described by me at p. 529 of ' British Barrows.' 

 It is true that in many of the long-barrow skulls the loss of the 

 anterior portion of the occipital bone renders it impossible to take 

 the ' absolute ' as opposed to the * upright ' height 1 i except approxi- 

 mative^; still I am well assured that the great majority of the long- 

 barrow crania resemble in the favourable relation of their height to 

 their length rather the South Sea Melanesian ' hypsistenocephali ' 

 of Dr. Barnard Davis (' Natuurkundige Verhandelingen/ Haarlem 

 1866, and 'Thesaurus Craniorum,' p. 309) than the low -lying 

 Tasmanian and Bushman skulls described by Professor Busk 

 ( f Journal Ethn. Soc. Lond.' Jan. 1871, p. 476). The conceptacula 

 cerebelli lie horizontally in male and female skulls of the stone age 

 both alike, differing herein markedly from the other type in which 

 they are usually either globular and convex downwards or slope 

 more or less obliquely upwards. In the norma occipitalis we often 

 find given us the most characteristic peculiarities of the stone-period 

 skull, and especially of the male skull. The sides of the pentagon de- 

 scribed by the skull's contour are in such skulls (see ' Langton Wold, 

 ii. 1,' pp. 204, 205) either quite vertical or even converge a little 

 from the level of the tubera parietalia downwards, whilst they slope 

 upwards with well-marked obliquity to a mesial vertical carina along 

 the sagittal line. The tubera parietalia in ' ill-filled ' male skulls 

 are relatively more prominent than in the better developed, in 

 which their site may be only very faintly marked ; they are 

 usually more distinct, whilst the mesial vertical carina is less 

 distinct, its position indeed being only feebly indicated, in female 

 skulls (see ' Sherburn Wold, vii. 1/ pp. 208, 209 supra). It is 

 in the norma occipitalis as well as in the norma verticalis that the 

 premature obliteration of the sutures to which Dr. Thurnam drew 



1 See p. 166 supra. 



