TRANSACTIONS OF THE SECTIONS. 149 
vides him with food for a year. This great cheapness of food leads to excessive 
laziness and misery. There is no stimulus to labour, and we find that the sago- 
eaters have generally the most miserable of huts and the scantiest of clothing. In the 
western islands of the Archipelago, where rice is the common food, and some regu- 
lar labour and foresight are required to produce it, the populations are in general 
more wealthy, more industrious, and more intelligent, and there is much more 
likelihood of introducing among them the rudiments of knowledge and civilization. 
The more detailed information given in the paper of which this is an abstract 
was collected by myself during three voyages to various parts of the coasts and 
islands of New Guinea, in the years 1857, 1858, and 1860, mostly undertaken in 
native prahus, and with a view to the investigation of the natural history of the 
country, 
On the Human Remains found in the course of the Excavations at Wroweter. 
By Tuomas Wrieut, /.S.A. 
Mr. Wright stated that human remains had been found in the excavations at 
Uriconium under three different classes of circumstances :—First were the ancient 
Roman cemeteries outside the town, which had been partially explored last autumn, 
and which were now under a course of further exploration. In an ethnological point 
of view the discoveries here were of comparatively little use, because, as all the 
interments hitherto discovered were by cremation, no skulls or other perfect bones 
were found among the remains of the dead; but we derived from them the know- 
ledge of the important fact that the inhabitants of Uriconium continued to burn 
their dead, and, in fact, seem to have had no other mode of burial, until the latest 
period of the existence of the city, that is, after the Roman government had been 
withdrawn from the island. Secondly, there were the remains of the inhabitants 
of the town, men, women, and children, who had been massacred by the savage 
barbarians when the city was taken and destroyed. He told several interesting 
anecdotes of the circumstances under which these remains had been found; and he 
stated that the skulls of these people presented no peculiarities which might not 
be found in any civilized town, such as Uriconium undoubtedly was. In the third 
place came the deformed skulls which had been the subject of so much discussion, 
a discussion which seemed not yet to have led to any satisfactory result. He 
described the circumstances and conditions under which these skulls had been 
found, and stated reasons for suspecting that the interments belonGed to a con- 
siderably later date than had been supposed. His friend Dr. Henry Johnson, of 
Shrewsbury, in a very able paper recently read before the Royal Society, had 
undertaken to show that there are chemical elements in the earth in which these 
remains lay which might have so far affected the substance of the bone as to render 
it pliable and capable of becoming deformed after death. But, supposing this to 
be the case, we seem to want entirely the mechanical cause of deformation. The 
bodies were not buried sufficiently deep to have a weight of earth upon them; in 
fact, when buried, their graves must have been very shallow. No weight of build- 
ings or of ruins had been laid upon them; but, on the contrary, from the quantity 
of small fibres of roots which are mixed with the earth, it appeared nebahle that 
during the middle ages the spot had been covered with low brushwood, which was 
usually the case with deserted ruins. He suggested that we can hardly understand 
why such a cause, affecting bones in this field, should not equally affect the skulls 
of the bodies interred in the adjacent churchyard; or why all the deformed skulls 
in this field should have the same deformity, or why the other bones of the 
body should not be similarly affected. The skulls of the Roman inhabitants, 
found with a great weight of ruins upon them, have in no instance yet observed 
undergone any similar deformity; and it must be added that the few skulls not 
deformed, found among these deformed skulls, were comparatively good types. It 
is intended to have a fresh and more careful exploration of the ground, in the 
hope that thereby some further light may be thrown on the subject. 
