UPON THE SERIES OF PREHISTORIC CRANIA. 263 



metaphysical expression < the retention of an infantile type,' which 

 refers us to causes such as scarcity of food which arrested potential 

 growth. The fact that the dimensions of the parietal bones are 

 usually less affected by any general stunting to which skulls may 

 have been subjected than those of either frontal or occipital is a 

 very striking illustration of this, it being well known that the two 

 latter factors of the brain-case attain their normal relation to 

 the parietal only after several years of childhood with its numerous 

 liabilities to disease and distress have passed away. None, how- 

 ever, of these prehistoric skulls have exhibited that extreme 

 lowness and smallness and precoronal depression of the frontal 

 bone which is seen in some of the skulls from the Melanesian 

 Islands and Australia, though in some of the hypsistemocephali 

 of the long barrows we do observe that relatively greater pro- 

 minence of some one segment in the anterior half of the parietal 

 in the sagittal line which is often observable in skulls of this kind 

 (see Dr. B. Davis, 'Natuurkund. Verhand.' Haarlem 1866, Deel 24, 

 PI. i. fig. i ; Busk, 'Anthrop. Instit.' vi. 3, Jan. 1877, PI. ix-xii). 



The small skulls of which I am speaking are sometimes, and 

 especially when belonging to males of the brachycephalic type, of 

 considerable textural solidity 1 , but I incline to think that it is mor-3 

 usual to find their ill-nourished character expressed by a slighter 

 structure and a lesser relative weight as well as by their smaller 

 dimensions. As I have already hinted (see pp. 190 and ztf supra), 

 I am inclined to think that it may have been the mal-nutrition 

 of such skulls as these which gave origin to the hypothesis of a 

 Lapp population having existed in prehistoric times in Denmark, 

 South Sweden, and in these islands. Latitudes much further south 

 than Great Britain went undoubtedly through a reindeer period, but, 

 without questioning this, we can stop short of averring that the 

 men who domesticated these animals in prehistoric Southern 

 Europe were of the same stock as the men who domesticate them 

 now in Northern Europe. The skulls of the modern Lapps do not 

 closely resemble either the stone and bone period skulls, or our 

 bronze period skulls ; neither of these periods coincided with the 



1 Such is the Ancient British Skull from Codford described by Dr. B. Davis, 'Cran. 

 Brit.,' pi. 14, as being 'dense in its structure and rather heavy;' and such are a con- 

 siderable number of skulls of the Romano-British period described by me as found 

 at Frilford, ' Archaeologia,' xlii. p. 458. 



