136 ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE SIGNIFICANCE OF 
the subterranean galleries. The tombs are of admirable design and 
style of art, and the details of their execution exhibit remarkable 
ingenuity and purity of taste. The author of the Voyage pittoresque 
de Sicile does not hesitate to declare that they surpass in elegance any 
that he has seen executed on the same scale. What hand has hewn 
out these gloomy recesses in the rock? To that we can give no reply. 
The chronicles of Malta are silent on this point. Time has defaced 
the vestiges which might otherwise have helped to the solution of the 
problem.”’* 
Other and very remarkable remains of antiquity abound in Malta 
and the neighbouring island of Goza, including the cyclopean ruins 
styled La tour des Géants, which have also been assigned by some 
writers to a Phoenician or Punic origin, as a temple dedicated to 
Astarte; and the Zadarnadur Isrira, a magalithic structure for which 
a Pelasgic origin is assumed. But in drawing any comparison between 
the chambered galleries of Ben-Djemma and the megalithic cham- 
bered barrows or cairns of the British Islands, we are at best reason- 
ing from the little known to the less known indices of prehistoric 
races; between-whom the points in common may amount to no more 
than those which admit of a comparison being drawn between the 
Brachycephali of the British Stone-Period, and the corresponding 
physical form and rude arts: of American gravemounds. 
Nevertheless the Ben-Djemma skull in the Mortonian collection is 
not improbably what it has been assumed it to be; and it is in-‘many 
respects a remarkable one. A deep indentation at the nasal suture 
gives the idea of an overhanging forehead, but the superciliary ridges ° 
are not prominent, and the peculiar character of the frontal bone is 
most strikingly apparent in the vertical view, where it is seen to retreat 
on either side, almost in a straight line from the centre of the glabella 
to the external angular processes of the frontal bone. The contour of 
the coronal region is described by Dr. Meigs as ‘a long oval, which 
recalls to mind the kumbecephalic form of Wilson.’+ ‘It it is of 
more importance, perhaps, to note that the remarkable skull -re- 
covered by Dr. Schmerling, from the Engis Cavern, on the left bank 
of the Meuse, buried five feet in a breccia, along with the tooth of a | 
rhinoceros and other fossil bones, appears to be of the same elongated 
dolichocephalic type. Its frontal development is long and narrow; 
* Malte et le Goze, p. 21. 
+ Catalogue of Human Crania in the Academy of Nat..Sciences of Philadelphia, p. 29% 
