CERTAIN ANCIENT BRITISH SKULL FORMS. 145 
Gn demand in different parts of the British Islands, and on the Con- 
4inent, will supply important craniological results. 
The novel forms thus occurring in modern heads, though chiefly 
‘traceable, as I believe, to artificial causes, are not the result of design. 
But the same is true of the prevalent vertical and obliquely flattened 
occiput of many ancient and modern American crania, as well as of the 
British brachycephalic class already described. Nor are such changes 
of the natural form necessarily limited to skulls of short longitudinal 
diameter, in which this typical characteristic is exaggerated by the 
pressure of the cradle-board in infancy. Now that this source of 
modification begins to receive general recognition among craniologists, 
its influence is assumed. asa probable source of the most diverse aber- 
rant forms. Dr. Thurnam, when referring to two skulls of different 
shapes, recoyered from the same group of British barrows, of “a some- 
what late though pre-Roman period,”’ on Roundway Hill, North Wilt- 
shire, thus indicates their contrasting characteristics, and suggests the 
probable source of such divergence from the supposed British type: 
“<The general form of the cranium (pl. 43.) differs greatly from that 
from the adjoining barrow, (pl. 42). That approaches an acroceph- 
-alic, this a platycephalic form; that is eminently brachycephalic, this 
more nearly of a dolichocephalic character. As the eye at once de- 
tects, the difference is much greater than would be inferred from a 
mere comparison of the measurements. The respective peculiarities 
of form in the two skulls, may possibly be explained by supposing 
that both have been subject to artificial deformation, though of a dif- 
ferent kind,—the one appearing to have been flattened on the occiput, 
the other showing a depression immediately behind the coronal suture, 
over the parietal bones, which seems to indicate that this part of the 
‘skull was subject to some habitual pressure and constriction, perhaps 
from the use of a bandage or ligature tightly bound across the head 
_and tied under the chin, such as to this day is employed in certain 
parts of the west of France, producing that form of distortion named 
by Dr. Gosse, the sincipital, or ¢éte bilobée.”’* The influence of the 
recognition of this source of change, is indeed yery manifest through- 
-out the fifth Decade of the Crania Britannica. An extremely bardi 
-cephalic skull of a youth, obtained from a barrow on Ballard Down, 
Asle of Purbeck, is described as unsymmetrical, and as affording ‘‘ toler- 
sably clear evidence that this form, if not always produced, was at least 
* Crania Britannica, Dec. v. pl. 43. 
Vou. VIII. M 
