DISTORTIONS OF THE HUMAN CRANIUM. 437 



megalithic race is as great at I believe it to be, we owe the preservation 

 of its crania to the secure resting-places provided by the chambered 

 catacombs ; and their discovery beyond such limits must be of rare 

 occurrence. 



In his communication to the Academy of Natural Sciences of Phil- 

 adelphia " On the Crania of the Ancient Britons," Mr. Davis deals 

 specifically with the questions here referred to. He begins by assum- 

 ing the Britons to have been, in the strictest sense, " the aboriginal 

 people of the British Isles ; " and then reverting to the general 

 correspondence of cranial form in each race — on which, indeed, the 

 whole science of craniology rests, — he indicates the latitude of diver- 

 gence which may be looked for within such ethnical limits, and thus 

 proceeds : — " Under these circumstances, we are prepared to expect 

 diversity of form among the crania of the ancient Britons ; but it is 

 not unreasonable also to expect that, true to the beautiful principle of 

 nature, of an endless diversity under a comprehensive uniformity, this 

 diversity will be restrained within limits and be subjected to definite 

 rules." Having thus defined the basis of his argument, he proceeds 

 to select the Ballidon Moor, Green Gate Hill, and Codford skulls 

 (Nos. 1, 2 and 6 of Table II.,) as representatives of the typical form 

 of the ancient Briton ; while he disposes of the long crania of the 

 megalithic tombs under the convenient designation of aberrant formSy 

 and selects the Uley skull as " an example of this peculiar aberration." 

 This affords an opportunity for demolishing "the theory of the doli- 

 chocephalic p re-Celtic race to its very foundations ; " in doing which, 

 he remarks : — "The circumstance that these long skulls have usually 

 been found in chambered barrows may be a mere contingency, little 

 more than accidental." It has been shown above, that this supposed 

 " mere contingency " has hitherto been fully as constant as the occur- 

 rence of the opposite type in the circular earth-barrows ; and that, 

 rare as such ancient examples must necessarily be, they already num- 

 ber upwards of thirty well identified illustrations. Let us then see 

 how far this latitude of aberrant cranial forms is made to stretch, in 

 order to bolster up the gratuitous assumption that the Britons of the 

 year B. C. 51, were necessarily the lineal descendants of the primeval 

 race that colonized the British Isles with its first human occupants, 

 at the lowest computation, thousands of years before. The condition 

 of the Britons when first visited by the Romans was by no means one 

 of complete isolation ; and the history of subsequent centuries is 



