NOTICE OF A SKULL BROUGHT FROM THE CRIMEA. 323 
crania, when I was gratified by receiving the gift of a skull, including 
the lower jaw, brought from Kertch, and described by the donor, as 
that of a Circassian lady. In form it presented no correspondence 
with the Macrocephalic type to which my inquiries had been pre- 
viously directed, for the forehead is markedly vertical, and in its 
general proportions it is strikingly characterised as a brachycephalic 
cranium of unusual width at the parietal protuberances, while marked 
by much delicacy and beauty, especially in the facial bones. 
A special interest attaches to the evidences of physical form, as well 
as of philological characteristics, pertaining to the tribes of the Cau- 
casian area, owing to the factitious importance that has been assigned 
to certain of them in modern Ethnology. It may not, therefore, be 
altogether valueless to put on record the facts connected with the 
recovery of the Crimean cranium in question; and to note the pecu- 
iarities of its form and measurements; though, from the mixed 
character of the population of Kertch it would not be safe to 
assign the crania of its modern cemetery to any absolute ethnologicah 
group, or to make them the basis whereon to found data for classifi-. 
cation, or for any comprehensive generalization. 
Dr. Latham, in his “ Varieties of Man,” classes the nations and’ 
tribes of the area within the range of Mount Caucasus under the 
generic designation of Dioscurian Mongolide, including in its chief 
divisions: The Georgians; the Lesgians; the Mizjegi; the Irén;. 
and the Circassians. He derives the term Dioscurian, from the- 
ancient sea-port of Dioscurias, where the chief commerce between the. 
Greeks and Romans and the natives of the Caucasian range took 
place. According to Pliny, it was carried on by one hundred andi 
thirty interpreters, so numerous were the languages; and one strik- 
ing characteristic of the locality, still noticeable, is the great multi- 
plicity of mutually unintelligible tongues. This therefore is the idea 
designed to be conveyed by tlie term Dioscurian. Caucasian would 
have been a preferable, because more familiar and precise term, but 
it has been already appropriated as an Ethnological division, in a way 
sufficiently confusing and indefinite, without adding thereto by the 
creation of such a contradictory union of terms, as would arise from 
such a designation as Caucasian Mongolide,—almost. equivalent, in 
popular acceptation, to European Asiatics! 
The use of both epithets, Caucasian and Mongolian, is traceable to 
Blumenbach, and the history of his adoption of the former supplies 
