PKEHISTORIC TIMES IN BRITAIN. 531 



stores of the Museum into its series. Both these other skulls pos- 

 sessed the short lacrymal so characteristic, as the subjoined tables 

 of measurements will show, of Sus cristatus and its allies, together 

 with the other points usually observed in that animal's skull. The 

 principal points, besides those of general facies and proportions, 

 which appeared to me to justify this assignment of skull 3251 a 

 (Royal College of Surgeons) were, in the absence of the shortness 

 of the lacrymal, — first, the great prominence of what may be called 

 the ] aery mo-frontal ridge, that part of the frontal bone, to wit, 

 which lies between the channel for the supraorbital nerve mesially 

 and the upper border of the lacrymal bone outwardly ; secondly, 

 the great relative development of the part of the third molar which 

 is posterior to the two anterior bicuspidate lobes of that tooth ; 

 thirdly, the absence of convexity ba<;kwards in the naso-frontal 

 suture. These three points are usually present in Sus cristatus^ 

 and they are usually found to be accompanied by the fourth pecu- 

 liarity of a short lacrymal. One or other of these characters may 

 be absent ; but in an undoubted specimen of an adult male Sus 

 cristatus I have never seen more than one of these missing ; whilst 

 it is rare for the second, and very rare for either the first or the 

 third, to be found in undoubted specimens of the Palaearctic wild 

 boar. In a skull figured by Mr. Richardson (I. c. p. 50), from 



' an excavation in an island on Loch Gur, a lake in the neighbourhood of Limerick,' 



and 



' found in company with skulls of oxen, goats, sheep, red deer, reindeer, and our 

 extinct gigantic deer, sometimes erroneously styled the Irish elk,' 



but considered by Nathusius (p. 150) to have belonged to a 

 domestic animal, it is true that the laery mo -frontal ridge is repre- 

 sented as of great size ; but we must set against the assigning of 

 much importance to this fact the considerations that the diawing 

 is taken from a reconstructed skull, that it is obviously inaccurate 

 in some points, as, for example, like a drawing in S. Miiller's 

 ' Verbandl.' (Taf. 28 bis, fig. 3), in having an extra tooth poste- 

 riorly to its canines, and that it may consequently be supposed to 

 be likely to be inaccurate in other particulars also. The fronto- 

 lacrymal ridge is, of course, in the adult underlain by a prolonga- 

 tion of the frontal sinuses ; it is, however, visible enough in very 

 young specimens of domestic pigs, which show other points of 



M m 2 



