78 SCIENTIFIC AND LITERARY NOTES. 
occiput naturally induces, whether the American races may not owe these cranial 
characters, in some measure at least, to artificial distortion? That nature 
accorded to many of them a brachycephalic skull, and also that this feature ig 
so marked as to be regarded as a typical character among the majority of the 
races of the western continent, may be admitted. Still, art has been frequently, 
almost generally, called in to heighten this conformation in a smaller or greater 
degree ; and it is by no means improbable that its influence may be perceived 
among the aboriginal crania of the British Isles, especially in this greater or less 
occipital flatness, which is frequently unsymmetrical.” (‘Cran. Britann./ 
Decade III., Sept., 1858.) 
The mention here made by Dr. Davis of my views on the American artificially- 
modified cranium is referred in his own foot-note to the Canadian Journal (Nov., 
1857). The reader of the ‘ Crania Britannica’ might be apt to suppose that the 
concluding remarks about British aboriginal crania were entirely new; but any 
one who takes the trouble of turning to the original article quoted above will 
find that I had considered the question in its bearings on “the brachycephalic 
crania of the Scottish barrows” on the same page: hence my assumption that 
Dr. Davis gave the weight of his testimony to my previously-published views. 
A highly-interesting chapter, by Dr. Davis, in the First Decade of the ‘ Crania 
Britannica’ is devoted to discussing both natural and artificial distortions of 
the skull; and there, it may be presumed, such an idea would have found place 
had it been entertained by the writer at that earlier date. He now refers to the 
Juniper Green, Lesmurdie and Newhbigging skulls as illustrating the artificially 
flattened occiput. But it is only in the description of the last of these, in the 
same Decade III., published in 1858, that a “slight distorting process”’ during 
life is hinted at. In the description accompanying the view of the Lesmurdie 
skull, in the earlier published Decade, “ posthumous distortion” and, in that of 
Juniper Green “‘ posthumous deformation,” are alone referred to. 
The Juniper Green skull, as will be seen from the description of it in the 
‘Crania Britannica, was recovered by myself in 1851, when I was collecting 
materials for a work on Scottish ethnology, supplementary to my ‘ Prehistoric 
Annals of Scotland, then just published; but which my departure for Canada 
put astop to. The skull was carried home in my hand a distance of some miles, 
and its flattened vertical occiput specially attracted my attention, and formed a 
subject of conversation on the way with my friend, Mr. Robert Chambers. My 
opinions were based on the conclusion that its peculiar form could not be 
assigned to “posthumous deformation,” as Dr. Davis suggests in his description, 
because the skull, when originally found, lay in a stone cist, well fitted and 
covered with a large:stone slab, so that it could not have been subjected to the 
slightest posthumous compression. It alsostruck me, on first perusing the descrip~ 
tion of another skull from a barrow at Codford, in Wiltshire, in the same earlier 
Decade II., that Dr. Davis had overlooked the very element then recognized by 
me as a probable source of certain peculiar forms of British crania. The 
Codford barrow skull is no less strikingly marked in its vertical occiput, and in 
its short longitudinal, as compared with its vertical, diameter. This, accordingly, 
ig Just one of the cases to which I referred as probably “furnishing an indication 
