ON THE PEOPLE OF THE LONG-BARROW PERIOD. 357 



months, or earlier, be competent to stunt the growth of their brains 

 in like ratio. It is, indeed, as the late Professor Phillips once re- 

 marked, something to be wondered at, considering the hardships 

 and scanty dietary to which all, or nearly all, wild races of men are 

 more or less subjected, that their skulls and brains should be as large 

 as we find them to be. f Ill-filled ' skulls, consequently, to use the 

 expressive epithet employed by Professor Cleland 1 , are not very 

 rare in series taken from long barrows. 



By an f ill-filled ' skull, Professor Cleland tells us, he means a 

 skull the exterior surface of which is marked by ' a mesial and two 

 lateral ridges on the roof, with flatness of the adjacent surfaces,' 

 and which has ' its position of greatest breadth high up upon the 

 parietal bones.' The mesial carina may, I would add, be prolonged 

 in such skulls over the frontal bone, and the frontal tubera may 

 retain their infant-like prominence. To these peculiarities I would 

 further add the presence of two depressions on the exterior of the 

 skull, corresponding to convexities on its interior surface, as com- 

 pleting in many ancient and modern savage crania the character of 

 1 ill-filledness.' One of these depressions is well known as the 

 1 post-coronal furrow,' but inasmuch as the mesial vertical carina 

 often developed in male skulls may be, and often is, continued along 

 the line of the sagittal suture, so as to divide the so-called ' furrow ' 

 into two parts, this name is not a happy one. The second of these 

 depressions corresponds to a part of the parietal bone which lies a 

 little above its posterior inferior angle, and immediately, therefore, 

 above the part of the bone which is furrowed internally for the 

 lateral sinuses. As in the former case, an inward ingrowth cor- 

 responds to the outwardly visible concavity, so that much such an 

 appearance is produced as we can imagine would have resulted from 

 pinching in the skull walls over this area, had they been plastic. I 

 have been able to demonstrate the rationale of these depressions in 

 the following manner :— By removing from a skull, with its brain 

 in situ, the greater part of its roof, but leaving of this structure one 

 antero-posteriorly-running arch of bone, corresponding to the sagittal, 

 and two transversely-running half-arches, corresponding respectively 

 to the half of the coronal and the half of the lambdoid sutures on 

 one side, the exact position of all the main convolutions and fissures 

 of the brain can be shown in their normal relations to these land- 



1 « Phil. Trans.,' 1870, vol. 160, p. 148. 



