84 PROFESSOR OWEN ON THE OSTEOLOGY OF 



establish the rule, and show the absence of frontal sinuses to be characteristic of those 

 Papuan ^Ethiopians'. In the African Negros whose skulls I have examined by section, 

 the frontal sinuses are developed. 



It may be worthy of inquiry and observation whether the voice of the Australian 

 Papuans is more harsh and guttural, and has less of that clear resonance in ordinary 

 conversation, which we may observe in most Europeans, in whom it depends upon the 

 greater extent of the cavities for vibratory air, which communicate with the nasal pas- 

 sages. The frontal sinuses are late in their development and subject to much variety 

 in the European races : too much stress must not, therefore, be laid upon their absence 

 in the Papuan aborigines of Australia, if even that absence should prove to be constant. 

 Another well-marked difference between the Papuan and European, by which the former 

 more nearly resembles the anthropoid Apes, is the larger premaxillary part of the upper 

 jaw, and its more obliquely prominent position, as shown by the section at 22, PI. XXX. 



In the skull of a young Orang Utan with the deciduous teeth (PI. XXIX. fig. 2), 

 the antero-posterior diameter of which is 5 inches 6 lines, that of the cranial cavity is 

 3 inches 11 lines, the vertical diameter of the same cavity being 2 inches 10 lines. In 

 this skull the nasal cavity equals little more than one-fourth that of the cranium, pre- 

 senting almost the same proportions as in the adult Man. The brain-chamber also 

 swells out in front of the rhinencephalic fossa (rA), showing a certain change of position 

 of this fossa in the progress of growth. The basisphenoid is as yet occupied only by 

 cancellous structure, the sinuses not being developed. 



But the relative capacities of the cranial and olfactory chambers are not absolutely 

 indicative of degrees of proximity to Man in the Mammalian class, or in the Quadru- 

 manous order. Some of the smaller species of the South American Monkeys, as, for 

 example, the Callithrix Pithecia, resemble the immature Orang in the predominating 

 capacity of the cranial chamber. This is due to a retention, with the diminutive size 

 of the whole body, of some other immature characters. The brain is relatively larger 

 in proportion to the body than in the Chimpanzee and Orang, but it has a much less 

 proportional amount of grey cerebral matter ; the surface of the hemispheres being as 

 little convoluted in the full-grown Marmoset as in the half-developed foetus of a larger 

 and higher species of Quadrumane. 



In the higher mammalian classes the brain rapidly acquires a certain bulk by an ac- 

 celerated rate of growth. In all the Quadrumana, and doubtless in a much larger propor- 

 tion of the Mammalian class, the brain, at that early stage of development, bears the same 

 large proportion to the bulk of the embryo in all the species, notwithstanding the great 



' Since the above was in type, I have had the opportunity of examining, through the Icindness of Dr. Acland, 

 Lee's Reader of Anatomy in the University of Oxford, the cranium of an Australian Papuan in the Museum 

 which owes so much to his zealous and judicious superintendence. Although the place of the frontal sinuses 

 was indicated, as in some of the previously examined specimens, by outward prominences, the sinuses had not 

 been developed. 



