I 



LECTUKE XIII. 391 



and Grenclien^ also large Wormian bones in the lateral wings 

 of this suture. 



When Professor His looks upon it as an important and 

 interesting fact, that since the pile-work period, the cranial 

 form has not in our country essentially deviated from the 

 original type, it merely confirms my own observations on 

 ancient skulls. 



The Rheno-Belgian skulls find their cognates in the long 

 and narrow heads of the Dutchmen who still inhabit the flat 

 lands. The skulls of Lombrive are allied to those of the mo- 

 dern Basques, the stone skulls of Denmark are allied to those 

 of the Lapps and Fins, who have been driven to the north. 

 The stone skulls of Switzerland present the type dominant in 

 that country at all periods. Even the existence of a short- 

 headed race, of which the relics are found in some graves in 

 Wallis and Waadtland, need not surprise us when we assume 

 that this present Eomanic type has, from the stone-period, been 

 as prevalent in Eastern Switzerland as the Helvetian type in 

 Central and Western Switzerland, and that across the St. 

 Gothard and on the banks of the Lake of Geneva it gave the 

 hand to the Helvetian type. Pruner-Bey, as stated in another 

 note, thinks he has recognised this brachy cephalic type on the 

 Waadtland banks of the Lake of Geneva, which, according to 

 him is also the type of the skull from the Tiniere cone ; and, if 

 this view of Pruner-Bey is correct, which by the way cannot be 

 quite inferred from his description, we obtain thereby an addi- 

 tional proof in favour of the remarkable constancy of cranial forms 

 even in very limited localities. We thus find in the oldest pre- 

 historic times every where very diversified races as distinct in 

 form as Negros and Europeans are at present ; but nowhere do 

 we find any proofs of migrations or radiations from a common 

 centre over the habitable globe. Though the short-heads 

 might be derived from Asia, it would not apply to the narrow 

 heads, which claim the highest antiquity, as no such heads 

 are met with in Asia. Thus, the facts we adduce from the 

 earliest periods, merely represent man as an original product 

 of the soil he then inhabited and still inhabits. In every such 

 old race there is presented a remarkable constancy of form, the 



