UPON THE SERIES OP PREHISTORIC CRANIA. 289 



Surgeons of England, and will be found described at p. 64 of Mr. 

 Heath's Jacksonian Prize Essay for 1867, published 1872. The 

 instantaneous tension of the explosion may be seen in this case to 

 have produced a great number of fragments with their broken sur- 

 faces even and vertical ; but what such violent expansion produces 

 momentarily on a tough skull, that, compression or other strain due 

 to the settling of the soil, or indeed shock from disturbance in 

 secondary burial, may very readily be understood to be competent 

 to produce on a skull rendered fragile by the lapse of centuries. The 

 Ebberston barrow and the Market Weighton barrow, in which 

 these fractures have been noted, were both of them cremation- 

 barrows, and the action of fire, even when as at Ebberston im- 

 perfect, would be distinctly in favour of making the bones more 

 brittle ; and in these and in the other barrows the great age of the 

 interments, which are undoubtedly of premetallic times, may be 

 taken in part-explanation of the loss of resistance testified to by 

 these fractures. It is remarkable that Dr. Thurnam (' Cran. Brit.,' 

 pi. 59) should have observed that 'the perfect skulls from these 

 barrows, inferred to be those of chiefs, are of considerably more 

 elongate type than those which are cleft,' and should have put on 

 record the fact that two of his supposed cleft skulls should have 

 had the frontal suture persistent and have possessed thus a broader 

 and less dolichocephalic form, i.e. have been better filled and 

 larger skulls ' than the rest.' For, as is well known 1 and may be 

 readily verified, better filled and larger skulls differ from smaller 

 ones in having thinner walls and being more fragile ; and to this, 

 and not to any such cause as their having been the skulls of ' serfs 

 of less pure blood than their lords,' a view contra-indicated by their 

 size (p. 237), we may reasonably refer the fact of a large proportion 

 of the broken skulls being broader than the unbroken. 



I have further to remark that fractured surfaces such as those 

 described by Dr. Thurnam, and interpreted by him as indicating 

 slaughter of victims at the funeral of a chief, may be and often are 

 found in skulls of skeletons buried singly and in skulls buried with 

 relics 2 , provided that they have been subjected to pressure from the 



1 See Weisbach, « Schadelform der Rumanen,' pp. 8, 12, 30. 



2 For example, the skull already spoken of at p. 196 as 'Rudstone, lxviii. 7/ had 

 been broken into a very large number of fragments with even and vertical edged, 

 and this though its walls were of great thickness. But with it the following relics 



U 



