EXPRESSION BY MEASUREMENTS. 273 



Builders, supposed preoccupants of the Otic and Mississippi valleys, 

 and developers of a partial civilization there, before the advent of the 

 Red Indian to the east of the Rocky Mountains, or south of the great 

 lakes. This opinion rests, in part, on the evidence of numerous 

 earth-works and remains of primitive art; but also on some rare exam- 

 ples of a head-form still more compact and brachycephalic than the 

 shortest of Red Indian skulls. But the prevalence of cremation in the 

 sepulchral rites of this extinct race has hitherto rendered the researches 

 of explorers of little avail for the craniologist. Examples of true 

 mound-skulls are as yet too few to justify absolute conclusions in 

 reference to a well-defined type. To a considerable extent, indeed, 

 it must be admitted that the assumed Mound-Builder type of head 

 has been mainly deduced from. a single, very remarkable, but possibly 

 exceptional example. 



Whilst, however, increasing experience warns us of the danger of 

 basing comprehensive ethnical classifications on a few examples, the 

 significance of head-form, as a test of race, is widely recognized ; and 

 with the admission of the value of such type-forms, the modes of 

 indicating them excite new interest. It is not sufficient now that we 

 are satisfied of the recovery of a human skull from the loam of the 

 Neanderthal cave, in the limestone cliff overhanging the river Dtissel ; 

 or in the same breccia with the fossil elephant, rhinoceros, and hyena 

 of the Engis cave, near Liege. We want, if possible, to know what 

 ethnical evidence they supply; and ere long find M. Pruner-Bey 

 demonstrating to the Anthropological Society of Paris an undoubted 

 Celtic character for the one, while the other is compared by Lyell with 

 " the highest or Caucasian type." 



With the demand for this new class of facts, the mode of presenting 

 them in the most accessible, trustworthy form, acquires an importance 

 unthought of till now. A cast is, of course, the nearest approxima- 

 tion to the original ; but this is costly, cumbrous, and only available to 

 a select few. The oldest of all methods, that of the pencil, can not be 

 lightly undervalued. It is due to the labors of the Egyptian drafts- 

 man that we know beyond all question of the existence of race types 

 of widest divergency, nearly three thousand seven hundred years ago; 

 and that the race which still differs most markedly from the European 

 type has undergone no change during all that lapse of time. With 

 results of such value traceable to the art of the old Egyptian painter, 

 we are not likely to underestimate its enduring worth ; and the appeal 



