388 



LECTURE XIII. 



skull^ on the drawing of whicli also the child skuli, from the 

 bronze-station of Auvernier, now in possession of Desorj can 

 be so placed that they perfectly correspond. 



" On a close comparison with the skulls in the Basle collec- 

 tion, it becomes evident that the fragment before us is allied 

 to the cranial forms now prevalent in German Switzerland. 

 Our collection possesses only the small number of eight normal 

 Swiss skulls, which have been obtained from the cantons Basle, 

 Berne, Schaffhausen, and Zurich, besides a skull from Biinden 

 of a different shape. The eight Swiss skulls are all distin- 

 guished by their comparatively great width and moderate 

 length ; they appear, in general, considerably higher than our 

 pile-work skulls; still there are two skulls, of Schaffhausen 

 and Ziirich females, which in height do not exceed the height 

 of the pile-works^ skulls." 



Prof. His further justly observes, that neither the skull of 

 Meilen nor the Swiss skulls present the decided characters of 

 dolichocephaly or brachycephaly, but are more allied to the 

 brachycephalic shape by the great width of the occiput. In 

 the Meilen skull the proportion of length to width is 100 : 83*2, 

 by which this cranium, as the Swiss crania in general, ap- 

 proaches the crania of the Lapps, in whom, according to 

 Welcker's table, the proportion is 100 : 84, and who are now 

 generally considered brachycephali. The same type of pro- 

 portionally large and wide heads with prominent supraciliary 

 arches, square forehead, broad and projecting parietal jaromi- 

 nenceSj and projecting occiput, has been at all times the domi- 

 nant form of all Swiss skulls. Undoubted crania from pile- 

 works which contained only bronze objects, specially a young 

 cranium found in Corcelettes, now in possession of my friend 

 Desor, in Neufchatel, possess the same characters as the skulls 

 found in more recent graves. 



The skull taken from a Roman grave near Geneva, belongs, 

 as I have since convinced myself by comparison, undoubtedly to 

 that type ; it is consequently a Swiss skull of the Roman period. 

 Among thirteen skulls of Grenchen, from which I excluded 

 four children — and female skulls, besides two decidedly narrow 

 skulls, the remainder gave the mean proportion of 83*8, and 



