152 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



low cranial vaults are most likely to be found. I cannot think that it 

 is wise to use plague skulls as types of seventeenth-century Londoners 

 as a. whole. 



Now we come to a new and striking development. It will be noticed 

 that, until the eighteenth century, the only skulls which show a pro- 

 portional auricular height of over -260 are those belonging to the Alpine 

 Race, that is to say the Beaker Folk and the Hythe people. Morant, it 

 is true, quotes Schuster's Long Barrow Folk as having -261, but there 

 were onlv eight of these available, and twenty more gave me an average 

 of -258. 



It is therefore fairly clear that in none of the races which have helped 

 to make the modern Englishman was the height of the head more than 

 •260 of the length, breadth, and height added together, except in the 

 Beaker Folk, where it reached at the highest computation -265. 



Bearing this in mind, it is interesting to notice, that in the early 

 nineteenth century the proportion of the head height of English soldiers 

 was -262, while in the men of the Royal Engineers, measured by Benington, 

 in the early part of the twentieth century it had risen to -267, and in the 

 patients at St. Thomas's Hospital in the present day it is -271. 



These last three examples are of the less well-educated classes, and 

 even in these it is remarkable how the proportional height of the head 

 has risen well above anything which any of our ancestors can show, even 

 were we to claim the Beaker Folk as our main ancestors, which all the 

 evidence tells us would be unjustifiable. 



But when we come to measure the educated classes of the community, 

 which have enjoyed a greater share of the modern, improved conditions 

 of environment, the result is still more striking, for we see the members 

 of the British Association with a proportional head height of -271, the 

 St. Thomas's Hospital students with # 272, the Oxford undergraduates 

 with *272, a number of British anatomists who met in Dublin in 1898 with 

 •275, and the University College staff with -278. 



Perhaps the point will be brought out more clearly if the means of 

 the groups of the proportional head measurements are contrasted. 

 Unfortunately I am unable always to take the number of observations 

 into account, since I have never been able to find out how many members 

 of the British Association were measured, but I find that where I have 

 the numbers it would have made no appreciable difference to the results 

 had I used them. 



We may see at the beginning of this list the relative proportions of the 

 three chief cranial measurements of the three stocks which took part in 

 making the mediaeval Englishman — the Mediterranean, the Alpine, and 

 the Nordic. At Rothwell we have, in the fourteenth century, the result 

 of the fusion of these three. In the seventeenth century, according to 

 my reading, are the dregs of the populace, with their low cranial vaults, 

 left behind to die of plague in London. At Clare Market again in the 

 eighteenth century is the low- vaulted, slum population of a great town ; 

 while in later years the height of the skull vaults has increased propor- 

 tionally with improved conditions of life, until in the richer and more 

 intellectual classes, which have enjoyed more of these improved sur- 

 roundings, the head height has increased enormously. 



