296 GENEEAL REMARKS 



to those of the later or Cimbric race. And we are further justified 

 in saying that Mr. Darwin has been misinformed when he says of 

 this suture (' Descent of Man,' ist ed. p. 124, 2nd ed. p. 39) that it 

 persists i more frequently in ancient than in recent crania, especially, 

 as Canestrini has observed, in those exhumed from the Drift and 

 belonging to the brachycephalic type.' The true rationale of the 

 persistence of the frontal suture would appear to be that it is a 

 teleological accommodation to the needs of the enlarging brain of 

 an advancing civilisation, with which enlargement is correlated 

 a diminution of the size of the jaws, and of the necessity for the 

 rotation of the brain and the frontal bone backwards which has 

 been so often noted here (see p. 240 supra) as occurring in macro- 

 gnathous men, and which is carried out still further in the 

 ' villainously low foreheads ' of the apes. 



We may now pass to the consideration of the few pathological 

 deformations which have been noted in these prehistoric skulls and 

 skeletons ; and we may begin by recording 



I. Abnormal Ossifications. 



Dr. Thurnam in his ' Further Researches and Observations on 

 the two principal Forms of Ancient British Skulls,' p. ^ suggested 

 that some ethnical importance might attach to the fact that in 

 remains from the long barrows an ' anchylosed condition of two or 

 more of the cervical or upper dorsal vertebrae ' had been not rarely 

 observed by him, whilst it was within his experience very un- 

 common and almost unknown in the round barrows. This con- 

 dition of things he thought was indicative of some peculiarity, and 

 that peculiarity the troglodytic mode of life of the people in whose 

 remains it had been observed, and whose heads and necks he 

 supposed would have been very much exposed to violent concussions 

 against the sides and roofs of their narrow passages and doorways. 

 Without discussing whether ' anchylosis of the vertebrae may have 

 resulted from such violence,' I would say that I have observed the 

 morbid condition of which Dr. Thurnam writes in many vertebral 

 columns of much later times than those of the cave-dwellers. 

 The Pathological Department of the Oxford University Museum 

 contains, under the Catalogue-numbers 159-165, seven specimens 

 with every appearance of being of modern date ; and the magnificent 



