THE NEANDERTHAL SKULL 577 
ascribe, not the wildness of a supposed contemporary [vorgeblichen 
Zeitgenossen] of the Gorilla, but rather an oppressed slavishness, to 
the Diisseldorf Troglodyte.” 
But I have elsewhere (Man’s Place in Nature, p. 142) quoted Dr. 
Fuhlrott to the effect that the superior semicircular line forms “a very 
strong ridge” in the Neanderthal skull ; and I find this statement of 
the possessor of the cranium to be fully borne out by the cast. In 
these points, as in many others, the Neanderthal skull has a curiously 
Australian aspect: though I do not venture, on that ground, to infer 
any special affinity between the man to whom it belonged and the 
Australian race. 
I should not feel myself on very safe ground if I endeavoured to 
follow Professor Mayer in his diagnosis of psychical peculiarities from 
the state of the spine and criste of the occipital bone. But surely, to 
deduce a man’s “oppressed slavishness,” from the condition of the 
muscular ridges on his occiput savours more of that spirit of drawing 
“weitgreifende Folgerungen,” of which Professor Mayer accuses 
English naturalists, than anything that has been said on this side of 
the Channel. 
But let us hear Professor Mayer further : 
“ In correspondence with this there is, of course, no question of a 
sagittal crest, or its projection ; the place of the sagittal suture being, 
on the contrary, depressed. I might say: shew me a fossil human 
skull with a sagittal crest like that of the Orang-utan (the male—the 
female possesses it but slightly—see Mayer in Troschel’s Archiv fur 
Naturgeschichte, 1845), and I will grant you your descent from an 
ancestral Prthecus.” 
But is it really necessary to wear a sagittal crest in order to make 
out a title to a pithecoid pedigree? Does not Professor Mayer 
believe that the Chimpanzees have descended from an ‘ancestral 
Pithecus’? Yet they lack the credentials upon which he insists— 
never a one yet having been able to show “a sagittal crest like that 
ofan Orang-utan.” 
And Professor Mayer does not seem to be aware of a circumstance 
which makes his argument still more frivolous, viz., that certain male 
orangs are devoid of the sagittal crest. 
Professor Mayer continues : 
“Further, the linea semicircularis of the temples is also but slightly 
marked, which indicates but weak temporal muscles. 
“The calvaria, indeed, possesses a solid consistence, and the hard- 
ness and smoothness peculiar to fossil bones, as well as a brownish 
colour, but exhibits no hyperossification ; but two lamella with diploé 
VOL. IL PP 
