I 



ADDRESS ON ANTHROPOLOGY. 889 



petual contradiction of the results of the skull-measureraents carried 

 out by others, which his paper (published in last year's 'Archiv 

 fiir Anthropologic,' pp. 12, 14, 20) abounds in, furnishes a practical 

 commentary upon the just quoted words. And Broca's words are 

 especially worth quoting, from the ^ Bulletin de la Societe d'An- 

 thropologie de Paris,' Nov. 6, 1873, ^p. 824: — ^Dans I'etat actuel 

 de nos connaissances la craniologie ne peut avoir la pretention de 

 voler de ses propres ailes, et de substituer ses diagnostics aux 

 notions fournies par I'ethnologie et par I'archeologie.' 



I would venture to say that the way in which a person with the 

 command of a considerable number of skulls procured from some 

 one district in modern, times, or from some one kind of tumulus or 

 sepulchre in prehistoric times, would naturally address himself to the 

 work of arranging them in a museum, furnishes us with a concrete 

 illustration of the true limits of craniography. I say *a person 

 with the command of a considerable number of skulls ;' for, valuable 

 as a single skull may be, and often is, as furnishing the missing 

 link in a gradational series, one or two skulls by themselves do not 

 justify us (except in rare instances, which I will hereinafter specify) 

 in predicating anything as to their nationality. Greater rashness 

 has never been shown, even in a realm of science in which rashness 

 has only recently been proceeded against under an Alien Act, than m 

 certain speculations as to the immigration of races into various 

 corners of the world, based upon the casual discovery in such places 

 of single skulls, which skulls were identified, on the ground of their 

 individual characters, as having belonged to races shown on no 

 other evidence to have ever set foot there. 



It is, of course, possible enough for a skilled craniographer to be 

 right in referring even a single skull to some particular nationality ; 

 an Australian or an Eskimo, or an Andamanese might be so referred 

 with some confidence; but all such successes should be recorded 

 with the reservation suggested by the words, uh eorum qui pen-^ 

 erunt? and by the English line, ' the many fail, the one succeeds 

 They are the shots which have hit, and have been recorded But 

 if it is unsafe to base any ethnographic conclusions upon the ex- 

 amination of one or two skulls, it is not so when we can examine 

 about ten times as many-ten, that is to say, or twenty, the 

 locality and the dates of which are known as certain q^-^^^^j^^' J 

 craniographer thus fortunate casts his eye over the entire series, 



