AD BUREAU OF AMERIGAN ETHNOLOGY (BULL. 33 
They are skulls of people of a different race with which no further 
acquaintance has yet been made in this country. What this race was, 
the writer was not able to show at the time of the publication of the 
report in 1902. Two possibilities suggested themselves at that time: 
One, that the crania represented some non-Indian people who pre- 
ceded the Lenape about Trenton; the other, that they might be crania 
of later intruders—or immigrants—into that region. The former 
theory could not be accepted without further proof, and the immigrant 
idea seemed hardly plausible, for the Delaware valley had been settled 
largely by Swedes, whose cranial type is radically different. On the 
whole, there are very few localities known, in Europe or elsewhere, 
where normally very low skulls had been observed. 
The problem was slowly followed up, a search being made in the 
American collections for examples and in European literature for 
reports of crania similar to the two skulls under consideration. As 
to other specimens on this continent, it was found that in very rare 
instances a low skull occurs normally among the Indians, but none of 
the few examples seen were of the type of the two Trenton crania, 
the faces especially differing therefrom. ‘The whole research strength- 
ened the conclusion that the Burlington County and Riverview Ceme- 
tery skulls are not Indian. The quest in literature, however, had a 
result which may come very near a definite explanation of the enigma. 
In 1874 Virchow® reported a number of extraordinarily low skulls 
mainly from northwestern Germany, from the Elbe to the coast of 
Holland, drawing attention at the same time to several “ Batavian ” 
specimens and others of the same nature from the islands in the Zuy- 
der Zee that had been*pictured or described previously.” All of these 
skulls were comparatively recent, the oldest not dating beyond about 
the ninth century of our era. The majority ranged in form from 
mesocephaly to brachycephaly; in capacity, from 1,215 to 1,700 
ce. c.; and in vertical height,¢ from 12 to 12.85 em. Several of the 
skulls showed a depression of the base; the majority were free from 
any indication of a pathological condition. Virchow recognized 
these skulls as constituting a distinct cranial form and called the type 
chamecephaly. He thought he recognized it in some Dutch paint- 
ings. As to its significance, he was undecided. 
= year later J. W. Sprengel published an account? of some Zuyder 
oR. Vinch ow. Uber eine iedice Schiidelform in Norddeutschland, Zeitschr. f. Hth- 
nol., VI, 239-251, taf. xvii, 1874. See also Zeitschr. f. Ethnol., 1x, 41, 1877, and consult 
in this connection His and Rutimeyer’s Crania Helvetica. 
> Particularly in Blumenbach’s Decades craniorum, pl. Ixiii, and in v. d. Hoeyen’s Cata- 
logue craniorum. 
¢ Virchow measured this height from basion to the highest point of the skulls anterior 
to the middle of the sagittal suture. This measurement exceeds that of basion-bregma 
by from 1 to 5 mm. 
4Schiidel yon Neanderthal Typus, Arch. f. Anthrop., v111, 49-66, pl. v—viii, 1875. 
ee 
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