152 THE HUMAN SKULL 



and Spy. The reviewer in Nature considers it as 

 that of a microcephalic idiot. And more recently 

 Topinard declares the skull-cap to be human and 

 Neanderthaloid. He considers la question jugee, 

 whilst nearly at the same moment as his article 

 appeared three other famous French anthropo- 

 logists, MM. Hamy, Manouvrier and Verneau, 

 declared, after having examined the skull itself, 

 that it could not be human. At the Leiden Zoo- 

 logical Congress Virchow declared the Java skull 

 to be an ape skull. In the opinion of Sir William 

 Flower and Professor Marsh, who were present 

 at the same session, it cannot be human, nor can 

 it be regarded as that of a true ape." To this 

 medley of opinions I will add the statements of 

 two of the authorities quoted above. Keith says 

 that the strong keeling along the metopic and 

 anterior parts of the sagittal sutures (i.e., the 

 median longitudinal line of junction of the cranial 

 vault) suggest that the bones found themselves in 

 a position to expend a good deal more osseous 

 matter after the brain had ceased to make any 

 demand upon them, so that it would be necessary 

 to examine similar specimens from the same local- 

 ity which, by the way, are not forthcoming 

 in order to obtain assurance that it was the skull 

 of a normal individual. Sir William Turner, after 

 pointing out the extreme difficulty that there is 

 in arriving at even an approximate estimate of 

 cubic capacity from so imperfect a fragment of 

 skull, goes on to state that, accepting Dubois' 

 estimate as correct it is probably not an over- 

 statement of the capacity " three Australian 



