CERTAIN ANCIENT BRITISH SKULL FORMS. 147 
ficial distortion may have been practised by certain primeval British 
tribes, particularly those who buried their distinguished dead in long 
chambered tumuli.” 
Accordingly Dr. Thurnam draws attention to the obliteration of the 
sagittal suture, both in the skull in question, and to a still greater 
extent in one figured by Blumenbach, under the name of “ Asiatic 
Macrocephali,”’ and expresses his belief that this ‘< has been produced 
by pressure or manipulations of the sides of the head in infancy, by 
which it was sought to favour the development of a lengthened form 
of skull; to which, however, there was probably, in the present in- 
stance at least, a natural and inherent tendency.” It is perhaps 
worthy of note here, that a long narrow head has been observed ag 
characteristic of certain Berber tribes, the occupants of ancient Punic 
sites in North Africa. 
It thus appears that a class of variations of the form of the human 
skull, which becomes more comprehensive as attention is directed to 
it, is wholly independent of congenital transmitted characteristics. 
Kumbecephalic, acrocephalic, and platycephalic, unsymmetrical, trun- 
cated, or elongated heads, may be so common as apparently to furnish 
distinctive ethnical forms, and yet, after all, each may be traceable to 
artificial causes, arising from an adherence to certain customs and 
usages in the nursery. It is in this direction, I conceive, that the 
importance of the truths resulting from the recognition of artificial 
causes affecting the forms of British brachycephalic or other crania 
chiefly lies. The contents of early British cists and barrows prove 
that the race with which they originated was a rude people, ignorant 
for the most part of the very knowledge of metals, or at best in the 
earliest rudimentary stage of metallurgic arts. They were in fact in 
as uncivilized a condition as the rudest forest Indians of America. To 
prove, therefore, that like the Red Indian squaw, the British allophy- 
lian or Celtic mother formed the cradle for her babe of a flat board, to 
which she bound it, for safety and facility of nursing, in the vicissi- 
tudes of her nomade life,—though interesting, like every other recov- 
ered glimpse of a long-forgotten past,—is not in itself a discovery of 
much significance. But it reminds us how essentially man, even in 
the most degraded state of wandering savage life, differs from all other 
animals. The germs of an artificial life are there. External appli- 
ances, and the conditions which we designate as domestication in the 
lower animals, appear to be inseparable from him. The most untu- 
