582 THE NEANDERTHAL SKULL 
Professor Mayer must, indeed, have a firm belief that anything is 
better than admitting the antiquity of the Neanderthal skull! 
3. Professor Mayer has no reason to complain if I defend the views 
he has attacked with the weapons he has thought fit to select. It is 
much pleasanter, however, to argue scientific questions in another way ; 
and although Professor Schaafhausen has impugned the accuracy of 
some of my own statements and conclusions in a much more formidable 
manner than Professor Mayer, I should err greatly if I treated with 
other than respect, the views of the careful and thoughtful observer 
to whom we are indebted for first bringing the now famous skull under 
the notice of anatomists. 
Professor Schaafhausen has communicated to the * Societé d’An- 
thropologie”” an abstract of a memoir which he had recently read _be- 
fore the Natural History Society of the Rhine and Westphalia on the 
Neanderthal skull! In this the following passage occurs :— 
“ The assertion of Mr. Huxley that the posterior part of the cranium 
is still more anomalous than the anterior, is without foundation. 
According to this author, the upward and forward direction of the 
squama occipitis, the shortening of the sagittal suture, the straight 
edge of the temporo-parietal suture, and, in general, the flattened form 
of the cranium, which hardly permits one to understand the possibility 
of lodging the posterior lobes of a human brain therein, would approx- 
imate this cranium to that of an ape, still more than the confor- 
mation of the anterior frontal region. But Mr. Huxley has forgotten 
that all these peculiarities are equally met with in the crania of the 
lower races: the only character which belongs exclusively to the 
Neanderthal skull is the altogether animal ridge which bounds the 
orbital cavity above.” 
Seeing that my main object, in all that I have written upon this 
subject has been to prove that the Neanderthal skull differs only in 
degree from certain existing human skulls, I hardly expected the re- 
proach conveyed in the last paragraph, which however errs, as I ven- 
ture to think, in affirming that the peculiarities of the Neanderthal 
cranium are to be met with ‘ equally’ in any human skull which has 
yet been described. It is quite true,as I have taken much pains to 
insist, that the features of the Neanderthal skull are simple exagger- 
ations of characters to be met with in other human skulls: but though 
some human skulls are greatly depressed, none has yet been seen so 
depressed as it: though some have large superciliary ridges, none has 
them so large as they are in it: and though, finally, some have the occi- 
' Sur le Crane de Neanderthal, par M. Schaaffhausen. Bulletin de la Societé 
d Anthropologie. Tome iv. p. 364. 
