408 ETHNICAL FORMS AND UNDESIGNED ARTIFICIAL 



of " the typical form of cranium of the ancient Briton," in contrast 

 to others which he calls " aberrant forms."* 



None of all the skulls figured in profile in the first four decades 

 of the Crania Britannica, exhibits the parieto-occipital flattening, 

 with its exaggerated brachy cephalic accompaniments, so markedly as 

 this one recovered from the Codford Barrow, and shown bere on 

 Plate II. Nevertheless it is obvious that it had not occurred to the 

 learned craniologist, when describing, as he says, every noteworthy 

 characteristic, to ascribe any of the features of this peculiar type 

 of cranium to artificial causes, though he has now adopted the 

 opinion that some of the British crania may owe in part their 

 brachycephalic proportions, with the accompanying unsymmetrical 

 development and vertical occiput, to some partial compression de- 

 pendent on the mode of nurture in infancy. The first example 

 of this peculiar occipital conformation which attracted my atten- 

 tion, as possibly traceable to other than mere ethnical specialities, 

 or natural variations from a normal typical form, occurred in a 

 skull recovered from a cist opened at Juniper Grreen, in the vicinity 

 of Edinburgh, on the 17th of May, 1851. Soon after the publica- 

 tion of the Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, when my attention was 

 specially directed to this subject, I learned of the accidental discovery 

 of a stone cist in a garden on the Lanark road, a few miles to the 

 north-west of Edinburgh, and immediately proceeded to the spot. 

 The cist occupied a slightly elevated site, distant only a few yards 

 from the road; and as this had been long under cultivation as a 

 garden, if any mound originally marked the spot, it had disappeared, 

 and no external indication distinguished it as a place of sepulture. 

 A shallow cist formed of unhewn slabs of sandstone enclosed a space 

 measuring 3 feet 11 inches in length, by 2 feet 1 inch in breadth at 

 head, and 1 foot 11 inches at foot. The joints fitted to each other 

 with sufficient regularity to admit of thdr being closed by a few 

 stone chips inserted at the junction, after which they appeared to 

 have been carefully cemented with wet loam or clay. The slab which 

 covered the whole projected over the sides, so as efiectually to pro- 

 tect the sepulchral chamber from any infiltration of earth. It lay in 

 a sandy soil, vsdthin little more than two feet of the surface ; but it 

 had probably been covered until a comparatively recent period by a 

 greater depth of soil, as its site was a little higher than the snr- 



* Proceedings of Acad. Nat, Sciences, Philadelphia. 1857, p. 42. 



