30 PREHISTORIC TREPHINING. 



5. Posthumous trephining consisted in, removing- fragments of the skull 

 of a person wlio had undergone surgical trephining. 



6. Eacli fragment was to exhibit a portion of the cicatrized edge of the 

 original operation; and the purpose was, probabl}^ to form an amulet to 

 protect from the same disease or injury for relief of which the operation 

 had been performed. 



7. The evidence so far confines the custom'' to neolithic man on the 

 continent of Europe. 



ADDITIONAL NOTE. 



Since the foregoing was printed a curious discovery has been made of 

 something like "post-mortem trephining" in a remote region. Dr. Dy- 

 bowski, who has been traveling in Yessel and the Aino lands, sent eight 

 Aino skulls to Mr. Kopernicki, who observed in five of them that a resection 

 of the foramen magnum had been performed in what he described as "a 

 systematic manner analogous to the trephined skulls of the I'rench dolmens." 

 In one skull a portion only of the edge of the foramen magnum had been 

 cut out; in another the alveolar process had been sawn off. lie supposed 

 that tlie purpose of the resection was not ceremonial, but medical, and that 

 tlie excised bone was to be used as a remedy. Nothing is known of trephin- 

 ing among the Ainos. 



Mr. Kopernicki sent the description of these skulls to the Ethnological 

 Society of Berlin, and Professor Virchow remarked that there Avas no doubt 

 that an artificial removal of fragments of bone had taken place, generally 

 from the posterior and lateral sections of the border of the foramen mag- 

 num and the adjacent parts. In the three Aino skulls in his own collection 

 nothing of the kind was to be seen, but a Goldi skull and a New Branden- 

 burg skull presented similar lesions He had supposed them, in the latter 

 case, to be due to an attempt to make a drinking-cup of the skull, it having 

 been found in the earth without any other parts of a skeleton, and in the 

 frontal bone two small holes had been made as if for strings. The five Aino 

 skulls in question had been dug out of graves by Dr." Dybowski himself, 

 and he did not think the drinking-cup tlieory was applicable to them. He 

 was unable to give any opinion as to the object of these resections.** 



■"Zeitscluift fiiiKtluioIoKic. 15oiliii, t8SI, xiii, 1<)1-192. See, also, foot-uotc 3. p. fi a)ifc. 



