134 ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE SIGNIFICANCE OF 
undoubted descendants of British Celts of Ptolemy’s age. Though: 
doubtless mingling Saxon and Norman with pure British blood, they 
probably preserve the native type as little modified by such foreign 
admixture as that of its supplanters in the most thoroughly Saxon 
or Anglish districts of England. It is therefore a question of some 
importance how far the extreme brachycephalic proportions of the 
so-called British type may be traceable to other than inherited ethnical 
characteristics ; whether in fact it is not entirely due to the unde-. 
signed flattening of the occiput, and lateral expansion of the brain: 
and skull, consequent on the use of the cradle-board. 
Meanwhile, turning from this supposed British skull of Roman 
times, to the one derived from Uley chambered barrow, No. 1, the: 
most ancient of the series, and assuming their chronological order to 
be undisputed, as it appears to be: we find no gradation from an ab- 
breviated to an elongated form, but, on the contrary, an extreme bra- 
chycephalic type interposed between the ovoid dolichocephalic Anglo- 
Saxon of the Christian era, and the extreme dolichocephalic, or kumbe- 
cephalic one belonging to a period seemingly so remote that Dr. 
Thurnam, when noting the recurrence of the same type in another 
chambered barrow at Littleton Drew, Wiltshire, remarked: “It is not 
necessary to admit the existence of any pre-Celtic race, as the skulls 
described may be those of Gaelic, as distinguished from Cymric, 
Celts; or the long-headed builders of these long, chambered, stone 
barrows, may have been an intrusive people, who entered Britain from 
the South-west. Can they have been some ancient Iberian or Ibero- 
Pheenician settlers ?”’* 
Among the rarer crania of the Morton collection is one to which a 
peculiar interest attaches, and which may possibly have some signifi- 
cance in reference to this inquiry. Its history is thus narrated im Dr. 
Henry S. Paterson’s Memoir of Dr. Morton: During a visit of Mre. 
Gliddon to Paris, in 1846, he presented a copy of the Crania Aigyp- 
tiaca to the celebrated oriental scholar, M. Fresnel, and exited his in« 
terest in the labours of its author. Upwards of a year after he receiv- 
ed at Philadelphia, a box containing a skull, forwarded from Naples, 
but without any information relative to it. ‘It was handed over to 
Morton,” says Dr. Paterson, “who at once perceived its dissimilarity 
to any in his possession. It was evidently very old, the animal matter 
having almost entirely disappeared. Day after day would Morton 
* Crania Britannica, Dec. iii. pl. 24, (4.) 
