UPON THE SERIES OF PREHISTORIC CRANIA. 317 



down to this day from cemeteries in this country, the contrast 

 would undoubtedly have been very much more sharply pronounced 

 if we had had before us representatives of all classes from those 

 early times. 



Secondly, though well shaped and capacious calvariae with ortho- 

 gnathous upper jaws do abound in the series from the stone and 

 bone ages, and after bearing a comparison, and by no means always 

 to their own disadvantage, with modern specimens, may be only 

 with difficulty distinguishable from them, the same can hardly 

 be affirmed of that most distinctive bone, the lower jaw 1 . Enough 



1 The caves of Cro-Magnon and Mentone have furnished us with similar lower jaws 

 from the palaeolithic men whose remains have been found in them, but, as in the cases 

 of the Bushman and the Tasmanian, these lower jaws were combined with the low 

 orbit so different from that of the Esquimaux, the wide opening of which in the skull 

 contrasts so strikingly with the oblique, slit-like aperture of the eyelids in their living 

 heads. And the prognathism of the Esquimaux, though it is possible to lay too 

 much weight upon this point, as also the convex malar portions of the maxillaries, 

 will be held by many to differentiate him from the palaeolithic and neolithic races 

 both. On the other hand, Professor Broca (' Bev. d'Anth.,' 1873, ii. pp. 26-28), with 

 the remains from the Caverne de l'Homme Mort before him, has no difficulty in 

 connecting these neolithic with the palaeolithic men, and Professor Boyd Dawkins so 

 long ago as 1866 (see 'Cave Hunting,' p. 359, ibique citata) collected a set of coin- 

 cidences between the implements, works of art, and animal surroundings of these 

 latter men and those of the Esquimaux, the number and variety of which it is difficult 

 to explain except upon the hypothesis of some connection having subsisted between 

 them. Colonel Lane Fox and Mr. C. E. Bance are cited in the ' Beliquiae Aquitanicae/ 

 p. 284, as accepting and corroborating this view ; and Sir John Lubbock at p. 262 

 of his edition of Nilsson's ' Early Inhabitants of Scandinavia,' whilst pointing out 

 that Mr. Busk's identification of TJnus priscus with Ursus ferox gives us some 

 additional 'reason for the belief that the Esquimaux once inhabited Western 

 Europe,' uses language of a more cautious character as regards this conclusion than 

 perhaps he might have done had not the author whose work he was editing expressed 

 himself (pp. 104, 141) as being so very distinctly opposed to it. Mr. Alexander C. 

 Anderson, 'Beliquiae Aquitanicae,' p. 49, and M. Sauvage, ibid. p. 220, would appear 

 to be of the same opinion as Nilsson ; most recent anthropologists, however (see for 

 example Mr. E. B. Tylor, 'Primitive Culture,' vol. i. pp. 64, 95, ed. 1873, or the 

 various authorities, old and recent, cited in the Address to the Biological Section, 

 British Association, Liverpool, 1870, p. 103), incline to accept the argument from 

 identity of custom to identity of race. 



As regards the language of the Esquimaux, Professor Sayce has told us (' Contemp. 

 Kev.,' April 1876, p. 722) that * if we turn to the grammars of those savage tribes who 

 best represent the infancy of mankind we shall find them marked by the greatest 

 synthetic complexity. The involved and monstrous words of the polysynthetic languages 

 of North America, where the Esquimaux aglekkigiartorasuamipok, for instance, 

 represents our " he goes away hastily and exerts himself to write," are really examples 

 of those pdmaeval undecomposed sentences out of which the logical precision of a 

 French grammar or the severe grandeur of a Semitic prophecy were eventually to 

 come. Their cumbrous barbarism is due to poverty, not to profundity of thought.' 



