CERTAIN ANCIENT BRITISH SKULL FORMS. 135° 
be found absorbed in its contemplation. At last he announced his 
conclusion. Hehad never seena Phoenician skull, and he had no 
idea where this one came from; but it was what he conceived a Phee- 
nician skull should be, and it could be no other.”? * Six months after- 
wards Mr. Gliddon received, along with other letters and papers for- 
warded to him from Naples, a slip of paper, in the handwriting of M. 
Fresnel, containing the history of the skull, which had been discovered 
by him during his exploration of an ancient tomb at Malta. Dr. 
Meigs refers to this in his catalogue of the collection, (No. 1352,) as an 
illustration of ‘“‘the wonderful power of discrimination, the tactus 
visus, acquired by Dr. Morton in his long and critical study of cranio- 
logy.” Such was my own impression on first reading it ; but I confess 
the longer I reflect on it, the more am I puzzled to guess by what 
classical or other data, or process short of absolute intuition, the ideal 
type of the Phcenician head could be determmed. I suspect, there- 
fore, if we had the statement in Dr. Morton’s own words, it would fall 
short of such an absolute craniological induction. The following is 
the sole entry made by him in his catalogue: “Ancient Pheenician? 
I received this highly interesting relic from M. F. Fresnel, the distin- 
guished French archeologist and traveller, with the following memo- 
randum, A. D. 1847 :—Crane provenant des caves sépulchrales de 
Ben-Djemma, dans Vile de Malte. Ce crane parait avoir appartenu & 
un individu de la race qui, dans les temps les plus anciens, occupait la 
cdté septentrionale de l Afrique, et les iles adjacentes.” The sepul- 
chral caves of Ben-Djemma, are a series of galleries with lateral 
chambers or catacombs hewn in the face of the cliffs on the south- 
west side of the island of Malta. Other traces besides the rock- 
hewn tombs indicate the existence of an ancient town there, although 
no record of its name or history survives. M. Frédérick Lacroix 
remarks, in his alte et le Goze, “ Whoever the inhabitants of this 
city may have been, it is manifest from what remains of their works, 
that they were not strangers to the processes of art. The sepulchral 
caves, amounting to a hundred in number, receive light by means of 
little apertures, some of which are decorated like a finished doorway. 
In others, time and the action of the humid atmosphere, have obli- 
terated all traces of such ornament, and left only the weathered rock. 
. . The chambers set apart for sepulture are excavated at 
a considerable distance from the entrance, in the inmost recesses of 
* Memoir of S. G. Morton; Types of Mankind, p. x1. 
