894 ADDRESS ON ANTHROPOLOGY. 



rules of the British Association, like the laws of England, have 

 more or less of an abhorrence of perpetuities. 



The largest result which craniometry and cubage of skulls have 

 attained is, to my thinking, the demonstration of the following 

 facts, viz., first, that the cubical contents of many skulls from the 

 earliest sepultures from which we have any skulls at all, are larger 

 considerably than the average cubical contents of modern European 

 skulls ; and secondly, that the female skulls of those times did not 

 contrast to that disadvantage with the skulls of their male con- 

 temporaries which the average female skulls of modern days do, 

 when subjected to a similar comparison^. Dr. Thurnam de- 

 monstrated the former of these facts, as regards the skulls from the 

 Long and the Round Barrows of Wiltshire, in the Memoirs of the 

 London Anthropological Society for 1865 ; and the names of Lez 

 Eyzies and Cro-Magnon, and of the Caverne de I'Homme Mort, 

 to which we may add that of Solutre, remind us that the first of 

 these facts has been confirmed, and the second both indicated and 

 abundantly commented upon by M. Broca. 



The impression which these facts make upon one, when one 

 first comes to realise them, is closely similar to that which is made 

 by the first realisation to the mind of the existence of a subtropical 

 Flora in Greenland in Miocene times. All our anticipations are 

 precisely reversed, and in each case by a weight of demonstration 

 equivalent to such a work ; there is no possibility in either case 

 of any mistake ; and we acknowledge that all that we had ex- 

 pected is absent, and that where we had looked for poverty and 

 pinching there we come upon luxuriant and exuberant growth. 

 The comparisons we draw in either case between the past and the 

 present are not wholly to the advantage of the latter : still such 

 are the facts. Philologists will thank me for reminding them of 

 Mr. Chauncy Wright's brilliant suggestions that the large relative 

 size of brain to body which distinguishes, and always, so far as we 

 know, has distinguished the human species as compared with the 

 species most nearly related to it, may be explained by the psycho- 

 logical tenet that the smallest proficiency in the faculty of language 



^ The subequality of the male and female skulls in the less civilised of modem 

 races was pointed out as long ago as 1845, by Retzius in Miiller's 'Archiv,' p. 89, and 

 was commented upon by Huschke, of Jena, in his ' Schadel, Hirn und Seele,' pp. 

 48-51, in 1854. 



