UPON THE SERIES OF PREHISTORIC CRANIA. 299 



upon the medulla oblongata. Of these two cases the first re- 

 sembles one of the two recorded by Virchow from the Berlin 

 Museum, in that death took place at an advanced age and without 

 any recorded symptoms of disease connected with the lesion in 

 question; the second resembles the second of those cases, in that 

 long disease was the cause of death. The third specimen from the 

 Oxford Pathological Department, No. 261, is the skull of a lunatic, 

 purchased with the Collection of Schroder van der Kolk, the 

 calvarial bones of which present, according to the Catalogue, { a 

 rugous wormeaten appearance, a consequence either of syphilis or 

 tinea.' Our fourth specimen was obtained from a Roman cemetery 

 at York, in which large numbers of skeletons were found buried in 

 putei with very little regard to any consideration, except that of 

 making the largest possible amount of room for the largest possible 

 amount of bodies to be interred. No clue to its nationality, there- 

 fore, except in the political sense of subjectdom, is available. The 

 specimen however is of interest with reference to the question of the 

 foetal or congenital origin of the anchylosis, as not only the spheno- 

 basilar synchondrosis would appear never to have been closed, but 

 also the basilar portion of the occipital bone would appear to have 

 been entirely absorbed, and the arch of the atlas to have coalesced 

 all but perfectly with the occipital, two circular orifices only 

 remaining for the outlets of the first spinal nerves. It is of 

 interest further, as combining with this anchylosis, firstly the 

 'plastic deformation' of Dr. Barnard Davis, the 'basilar impression' 

 of Virchow (1. c.) ; and secondly, a flattening and widening out of 

 the cranial vault, the height from the edge of the anterior arch of 

 the atlas next to the base of the brain up to the vertex being only 

 4" as against a maximum width of 6-3", so as to give the skull what 

 Dr. Barnard Davis calls a { discoid,' and Virchow (1. c.) a ' molen- 

 formig ' appearance. Our fifth skull belonged to a man (Cowlam, 

 lvii. 3) of from twenty-five to thirty years of age, whose shortness 

 of stature (5' 1") and ill-filledness of skull (with cephalic index of 76) 

 would point to his having belonged to the stone age, a supposition 

 which his archaeological surroundings do not, I apprehend, con- 

 tradict (< British Barrows,' pp. 215-6). In this skull a considerable 

 part of the occipital bone has been lost, but on the left side its 

 condyle has been left with the articular process of the atlas anchy- 

 losed to it without any trace of recent discontinuity. 



