3900.] Annual Address. 46 



menfc of Herodotus that the skulls of the Persian soldiers slain at the 

 battle of Plaisea were thin, and those of the Egyptians were thick, or, 

 to cite his explanation, that the former lived an indoor life and always 

 wore lints, while the latter shaved their heads from infancy and exposed 

 tliem to the sun without covering, as the earliest instance of the modern 

 scientific doctrine of the influence of external conditions But when 

 Ctesias speaks of tlie small stature, black complexion, and snub noses of 

 the inhabitants of India, we feel that the description is precise enough to 

 enable us to identify them with the Dasyus and Nishadas of early Sanskrit 

 literature, and we are almost tempted to wonder whether the Grreek 

 physician, who was doubtless acquainted with the canon of Polycletus, 

 may not have devised some accurate method of recording the racial cha- 

 racteristics of w^hicli he was so accurate an observer. Curiously enough 

 the famous potter, Bernard de Palissy, was the first to throw" out, in a 

 humourous dialogue published in J 563, the idea of measuring the skull 

 for purposes other than artistic. The passage quoted by Topinard is 

 too quaint to be omitted here: — " Quoy voyant il me print en vie de 

 mesurer la teste d'un homme pour s9avoir directement ses mesures, et 

 me semble qne la sauterelle, la regie et le compas me seroient fort 

 propres pour cest affaire, mais qaoy qu'il en soit je n'y seen jamais 

 trouver una mesure osseuse, parce que les folies qui estaient en ladite 

 teste luy faisaient changer ses mesures." 



Palissy however cannot be seriously put forward as the founder of 

 scientific craniometry and that title peihaps most properly belongs to the 

 Swedish naturalist Anders Retzius who in 1842, hit upon the device of 

 expi-essing one of the chief characters of the skull by the relation of its 

 maximum breadth to its maximum length, tlie latter being taken to be 

 one tliousand. Iti this way he distinguished two forms of skull — the 

 dolicho-cpphalic, in which the length exceeds the breadth by about one- 

 fourth, and the brnchy-cephilic, in which tlie length exceeds the breadth 

 liy a proportion varying from one-fifth to one-eighth. Thus according 

 to Retzins the Swedes are dolicho-cephalic in the proportion 778; 1000, 

 and the Lapps bracliy- cephalic in the proportion 865 : 1000. He also 

 distinguished two types of face— the orthognathic^ in whicli the jaws 

 and teeth project not at all, or very little, beyond a line drawn from the 

 forehead, and the prognathic, in which this projection is very marked. 

 His classification of races was based upon these characteristics. Tn 

 1861 ^I. Paul Broca improved Retzius' system by expressing it in 

 hundredths instead of thousandths, by introdncing an intermediate 

 group called mesati-cephalic, ranging from 777 to 80 per cent., and by 

 giving the name of cephalic index to the relation between the two 

 diameters. From time to time other characters have been added to the 



