510 ON FOSSIL REMAINS OF MAN 
At the north-eastern pole are situated the people with the most 
eminently brachycephalic and orthognathous skulls; at the south- 
western pole, those people who have the most eminently dolichoceph- 
alic and prognathous skulls; while along the ethnological equator 
the races of men are, for the most part, oval-headed, or, if dolicho- 
cephalic, they are orthognathous. Passing from the ethnological poles, 
in either direction, there is a tendency to the softening down of the 
extreme types of skull. Turning from this general view of cranial 
modification, which was expressly stated to be open to many 
exceptions in detail, the question was next raised whether the 
distribution of cranial forms had been the same in all periods of the 
world’s history, or whether the older races, in any locality, possessed 
a different cranial character from their successors. 
No evidence of the existence of such older and different races has 
yet been obtained from Northern Asia, from Africa beyond the shores 
of the Mediterranean, or from Australia ; it may be that the Alfourons 
and the mound-builders of the Mississippi valley are to be regarded 
as ancient stocks which preceded modern immigration ; but definite 
evidence is wanting with regard to these and similar cases. In 
Northern and Western Europe, however, there is little doubt that 
several races, different in cranial conformation and in civilization, have 
succeeded one another. Below and beyond the traces of Roman 
civilization, archzologists find evidence, first, of people who used iron, 
then of those who employed bronze, and then of those who were 
acquainted only with stone and flint (or bone) weapons and im- 
plements. How far these various weapons may have been used 
at different epochs by the same people, is a question yet to be 
decided ; but that in some parts of Europe, at any rate, they 
characterize people of different cranial structure, appears to be 
tolerably well made out. 
The remarkable crania from tumuli of the stone period at Borreby, 
in Denmark, figured by Mr. Busk, were cited as authentic examples 
of the skulls of people of the epoch in which stone axes ground to an 
edge were the chief weapons. 
The evidence of the antiquity of these people afforded by the 
peat bogs of Denmark, and the probability of their contemporaneity 
with the makers of the “refuse-heaps” of Denmark, and of the 
pile-works of Switzerland, were next considered. Ancient as the 
Borreby race may be, they peopled Denmark subsequently to its 
assumption of its present physical geography, and since its only great 
quadrupeds were the urus, the bison, and deer. 
The Engis skull, on the other hand, is of a date antecedent to the 
