274 GENERAL REMARKS 



suffer from irritation, inflammation, and other morbid action are so 

 because normally they are the seats of habitual activity, this dis- 

 tribution of the signs of disease over the area in question is of 

 cardinal significance. 



In the last place, I will mention very briefly the indications 

 which the comparative anatomy of some of the various races of 

 mankind, and of the developing skull and brain in the human 

 species, as also the proportion of two segments of the parietal bone 

 anterior and posterior to the line of the primitive centre of ossifica- 

 tion, furnish to us in this investigation. 



The most typically dolichocephalic modern race, not even exclud- 

 ing the Esquimaux, is beyond doubt the Australian. As was pointed 

 out long ago in the * Osteological Catalogue of the Royal College 

 of Surgeons/ vol. ii. p. 838, No. 5385, brachycephalic skulls are to 

 be found amongst Negro tribes, and (see p. 269 supra) instances may 

 be found among Negro brains of excessive narrowness in the zone 

 of brain between the supra-marginal and the occipital convolutions, 

 though some of the most forwardly placed parietal tubera which I 

 have ever met with are from series of Caffre crania ; and though, 

 secondly, these tubera are sometimes backwardly placed even in 

 dolichocephalic Negro heads. Confining ourselves therefore to the 

 consideration of the Australian cranium, which furnishes us with a 

 simple case, as its uniformity and also the degraded character of 

 the race are alike beyond dispute, we have to say that the parietal 

 eminences all but always occupy a relatively forward position in the 

 parietal bone and in the skull of the Australians ; and that to the 

 unvarying dolichocephaly of their brain the segments lying pos- 

 teriorly to the plane of the 'lobulus tuberis' always contribute a 

 quantitatively large though not a quantitatively superior proportion. 

 Without going further into the controversy alluded to at pp. 

 344, 245 supra, as to the relative superiority of the dolichocephalic 

 or brachycephalic type, it may suffice to say here that not only 

 would the inferiorly irrigated and histologically inferior segments of 

 the modern European dolichocephali found in Germany, England, 

 and Ireland form a smaller proportion of the entire length of their 

 brains than, judging from their skulls or from such casts as those 

 labelled 6 and 7 in the Museum of the College of Surgeons, the 

 homologous segments do in the Australian brain, but that the 

 anterior segments of the European brain are broader, with their 



