UPON THE SERIES OF PREHISTORIC CRANIA.. 309 



'Naturvolker ' is plain enough, the same cannot be said of the inter- 

 pretation or signification of the fact. In none of the recent, nor, so 

 far as I can learn from plates, in any of the fossil Simiadae, has any 

 fission of the fang of a canine been observed ; indeed the lower-jaw 

 canines in this family with their single fangs and the lower-jaw 

 premolars with their invariably double ones differ from their human 

 homologues more strikingly than do any of their other teeth. It 

 is true that in some even of the Cynomorphous Simiadae the fang 

 of the lower canine is laterally grooved as well as laterally com- 

 pressed ; and in the gorilla the long diameter of the oval section of 

 this fang forms a much more widely open angle mesially with the 

 long axis of the molar series than it does in the chimpanzee or 

 orang. Still these are but approximations to what is fully carried 

 out in the bifidity of the human canine fang ; and though we may 

 speak of them, therefore, as ' anthropoid/ we cannot speak of it as 

 ' pithecoid.' To my thinking a fair expression of the facts may 

 be given by saying, the interchangeability of form which exists 

 between ' canines ' and ' premolars/ but which ordinarily requires 

 for its illustration the comparison of two distinct species, is exem- 

 plified by different varieties within the limits of our own single 

 species. If in this instance we have to go as far afield as are such 

 animals as Galeopithecus, Erinaceus, and Talpa, to understand how a 

 so called ' canine ' can become ' premolariform ' and develope two 

 fangs, it is but one instance out of many which show that many 

 questions in anthropology can be read only in the light furnished 

 by comparative anatomy l . 



I have not observed in these series any wisdom teeth with that 

 larger development which is so commonly noticeable in the dental 

 series of Australians as compared even with other black races, not 

 to say with Europeans. Rather indeed the reverse, the wisdom 

 teeth being often very small, especially in female skulls of the 

 earlier series. Nor in spite of the grinding down which is so 

 marked a feature in many of these skulls, as for example in the 

 skull of the woman from Cissbury, described by me in the ■ Journal 

 of the Anth. Inst./ vol. vi. p. 34 (Article XIX), have I ever observed 



1 For a philosophical discussion of the homologies and nomenclature and the inter- 

 changeability of form in mammalian teeth, see Messrs. Moseley and Lankester, 

 ' Journal of Anatomy and Physiology/ Nov. 1868, ser. ii. No. iii. p. 73, and Mr - 0. S - 

 Tomes, 'Manual of Dental Anatomy,' 1876, p. 260. 



