TRANSACTIONS OF THE SECTIONS. 147 



wish to be understood to mean by this illustration not only that the two lines 

 of inquiry are both dependent upon the combination and counterchecking of two 

 different methods, but also that their results, like the results of some other Immau 

 investigations, must not bo always, eveu though they maybe sometimes, considered 

 to be free from all and any need for qualification. Persons like M. Broca and Pro- 

 fessor Aeby, who have carried out the most extensive series of measm-ements, are 

 not the persons who express themselves in the strongest language as to cranio- 

 graphy being the universal solvent in ethnography or anthropology. Aeby, for 

 example, in his ' Schadelformen der Meuschen imd der Alien,' 18G7, p. Gl, says : — 

 " Aus dem gesagteu geht hervor, dass die Stellung der Anthropologic gegeuiiber 

 den Schadelformen eiue ausserordentlich schwierige ist ;" and the perpetual contra- 

 diction of the results of the skuU-measm-ements carried out by others, which his paper 

 (published in last year's ' Archiv fiir Authropologie,' pp. 12, 14, 20) abounds iu, 

 furnishes a practical comuientarj^ upon the just quoted words. And Broca's words 

 are especially worth quoting, from the ' Bulletin de la SociettS d'Anthropologie de 

 Paris,' Nov. G, 1873, p. 824 : — " Dans I'etat actuel de nos connaissances la cranio- 

 logie ne pent avoir la pretention de voler de ses propres ailes, et de substituer sea 

 diagnostics aux notions fournies par I'ethnologie et par I'archeologie." 



I would venture to say that the way iu which a person with the command of a 

 considerable number of skulls procured from some one district iu modern times, or 

 from some one kind of tumulus or sepulchre in prehistoric times, would naturally 

 address himself to the work of arranging them in a museum, furnishes us with a 

 concrete illustration of the true limits of craniography. I say ''a person with the 

 command of a considerable number of skulls ;" for, valuable as a single skull may 

 be, and often is, as furnishing the missing link in a gradational series, one or two 

 skulls by themselves do not justify us (except in rare instances, which I will here- 

 inafter specify) iu predicating any thing as to their nationality. Greater rashness has 

 never been shown, eveu in a realm of science in which rashness has only recently 

 been proceeded against under an Alien Act, than iu certain speculations as to the im- 

 migration of races into various corners of the world, based upon the casual disco- 

 very iu such places of single skulls, which skulls were identified, on the ground of 

 their individual characters, as having belonged to races shown on no other evidence 

 to have ever set foot there. 



It is, of course, possible enough for a skilled craniographer to be right in referring 

 even a single skull to some particular nationality ; an Australian or an Eskimo, or 

 an Audamauese might be so referred with some confidence ; but all such successes 

 should bo recorded with the reservation suggested by the words, uhi cormn qui 

 periencnt ? and by the English line, " the many fail, the one succeeds." They are 

 the shots which have hit, and have been recorded. But if it is unsafe to base 

 any ethnographic conclusions upon the examination of one or two skulls, it is 

 not so when we can examine about ten times as many — ten, that is to say, or 

 twenty, the locality and the dates of which are known as certain quantities. A 

 craniographer thus fortunate casts his eye over the entire series, and selects from 

 it one or more which correspond to one of the gi-eat types based by Retzius not 

 merely upon consideration of proportionate lengths and breadths, but also upon 

 the artistic considerations of type, curve, aud contour. He measures the skulls 

 thus selected, and so furnishes himself with a check which even the most practised 

 eye cannot safely dispense with. He then proceeds to satisfy himself as to whether 

 the entire series is referable to one alone of the two great tyjiical forms of 

 Brachycephaly or Dolichocephaly, or whether both types are represented in it, 

 and if so, in what proportions and with what admixture of intermediate forms. 

 "With a number of Peruvian, or, indeed, of Western American skulls generallj-, of 

 Australian, of Tasmanian, of Eskimo, of Veddah, of Andamaneso crania before him, 

 the craniographer would nearly alwaj-s, setting aside a few abuormally aberrant 

 (which are frequently morbid) specimens, refer them all to one single type *. 



* It is not by any means entirely correct to say that there is no variety observable 

 among races living in isolated savage purify. The good people of Baden who, when they 

 first saw them, said all the Bashkirs in a regiment brought up to the Rhine iu 1813 by the* 

 Russians were as like to each other as twins, found, in the course of a few weeks, that 

 they coidd distinguish them readily and sharply enough (see Eeker, ' Crania Germaniip 



