736 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 



7. A Rare Form of Divided Parietal in the Cranium of a Chimpanzee. 1 

 By Professor C. J. Patten, M.A., M.D., Sc.D. 



Apart from the presence of groups of small wormian bones, division of the 

 parietals in the anthropoids is a very rare condition. In M. le Double's com- 

 prehensive work on the variations of crania only, one case of complete parietal 

 division by a horizontal suture is recorded in his tables, which date back over 

 fifty years. The first case was described by Johannes Ranke in 1899 in an 

 adolescent female orang, one of 245 orang crania in the Selenka collection of the 

 Munich Anthropological Institute. In the following year Ales Hrdlicka pub- 

 lished a case in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, which 

 divisions he claims to be 'not only the first complete divisions of the parietal 

 observed in a chimpanzee, but are also unique in character, no divisions of the. 

 same nature having been observed before, either in man, or apes, or monkeys.' 

 The case now described appears also to be one of complete division of both 

 parietals, each by a horizontal suture running the entire length of the bones 

 and joining the coronal with the lambdoid sutures. This case, however, is 

 of further interest owing to the extraordinary way in which the upper segment 

 of each bone is again subdivided, giving that part of the vault of the cranium, 

 when viewed from above, the appearance of the counties of a map. Correlated 

 with the condition there is a thinning out of the bones of the cranial vault, and 

 reduction of the size and strength of the zygomatic arch and of many processes 

 of the base of the skull. In weight this cranium is decidedly lighter than that 

 of an average chimpanzee of its size. 



8. Report of the Committee to Organise Anthropometric Investigation in 

 the British Isles. — See Reports, p 256. 



9. The Bishop's Storlford Prehistoric Horse. 

 By Rev. A. Irving, D.Sc, B.A. 



The author gave a general description of the conditions under which the 

 skeleton was found. Details were given as to the condition of the bones, and 

 the action upon them of organic acids while the quaternary pond, in which the 

 animal was mired, was open to the air, and lief ore it was buried under land- 

 slides from the hill. A chemical analysis has been made of one of the bones of 

 the trunk in Sir William Ramsay's laboratory at University College. The bones 

 have- been compared with those of Neolithic Age at South Kensington and 

 Jermyn Street; also with those from Newstead, near Melrose, of the Roman 

 period. Close anatomical relations were given between the Stortford skeleton 

 and bones discovered (a) in the neolithic deposits of Pomerania, (b) the Bronze 

 deposits of Spandau, (c) the pile-dwelling site of the Starnberger See, (d) the 

 river drift at Ilford, and (e) the pleistocene deposits of Granchester. The verte- 

 bral formula is that of the zebra (Flower), and differs both from horses of the 

 Eijuus Prejwalskii type and the Plateau type of Evvart. It is a lighter-limbed 

 animal than Nehring's Remagen horse, though in its teeth it resembles that most 

 closely. Upon the whole it seems to be a blend of the ' Forest ' and the ' Plateau ' 

 types* of Ewart. The evidence obtained on the site of its discovery was dis- 

 cussed, including a Holocene molluscan fauna (Woodward). The general con- 

 clusion seems warranted that the horse represents a race of post-Pleistccene 

 times, as a survival into the Neolithic or Bronze Age, certainly not later than the 

 La Tene acre. 



1 To be published in full in Journ. R. Anthrop. Institute. 



