ON THE PEOPLE OF THE LONG-BAREOW PEEIOD. 3^9 



generally, are ordinarily well- and not ' ill-filled ' skulls, it may, 

 nevertheless, be allowable to say here that the ' brachycephali 

 angustiores,' as Professor Cleland would call 1 the brachycephali of 

 several other parts of the world, frequently present the depressions 

 of which I have been writing. An excellent instance of the postero- 

 parietal inward pinching of the skull-walls was furnished to me 

 quite recently by a Maori skull presented to the University Museum 

 by Dr. Batt, the skull having a latitudinal index of 79, and pos- 

 sessing also markedly the contour which induced Retzius to class 

 the Maoris as ' brachycephali.' 



When we come, however, to compare the long-barrow people 

 with the still surviving inhabitants of the Southern Sea Islands, 

 a comparison first instituted by Dr. Thurnam 2 , we must guard 

 ourselves from supposing that ' ill-filled ' skulls are by any means 

 the rule amongst the ancient British inhabitants of this country, as 

 they are amongst the little favoured indigenes of Australia and 

 Tasmania. Dr. Thurnam's own tables of the capacity of the skulls 

 and the weight of the brains of the modern English and the ancient 

 Briton 3 , which show that the larger quantities characterise the 

 older race, furnish the needful qualification to his above-cited com- 

 parison. To this I would add, that in none of the long-barrow 

 skulls which I have had the opportunity of measuring has the alti- 

 tudinal index been found to be lower than the latitudinal ; and that 

 a point of degradation, therefore, has been found wanting in this 

 series which Professor Busk has observed to exist in some priscan 

 dolichocephalic skulls, and in Tasmanian and Bushman crania 

 amongst those of modern savages 4 . The same facts may be ex- 

 pressed in another way by saying that the ' Sion Typus 5 ' of His 

 and Rutimeyer, a type which Rutimeyer 6 has spoken of as cha- 

 racterised by 'Kraftigkeit und Wurde,' is by no means sparsely 

 represented in the long-barrow series, the larger female skulls 

 corresponding very closely with the description given by those 



1 See « Phil. Trans.,' 1870, p. 148. 



2 ' Mem. Soc. Anth., Lond.' iii. p. 24. 



3 L.c, vol. i. pp. 55 and 57. 



* See 'Journal Ethn. Soc. London,' Jan., 1871, p. 467. 



5 For a description of the several types of prehistoric crania, as given by His and 

 Rutimeyer, see their 'Crania Helvetica,' 1864; or Huxley on 'Prehistoric Remains 

 of Caithness,' p. 103 seqq., 1866. 



6 ' Jahrbuch der Schweizer. Alpen' for 1864, p. 398. 



