REVIEWS CRANIA BRITANNICA. 44f) 



and the arena of the Briton's untold history ; or when the Saxon 

 colonist was entering amid the Druid oak-glades of England, a 

 stranger, like his hardy descendant who pioneers the way amid the 

 primeval forests of our far-west. Morton, in his Crania Americana, 

 dealt with the ethnic craniology of a very wide and nearly virgin 

 area. From the northern Arctic circle, to where the Terra del 

 Euego reaches towards Antarctic snows, the American Ethnologist 

 sought to gather his materials, and from the data thus accumulated, 

 conclusions applicable to the two continents of the new world have 

 been deduced. Compared with such a wide field of investigation, 

 the little island-home of the Saxons may well seem narrow ground 

 for exploration. But to the Ethnologist it is not so. There, amid 

 the rudest traces of primeval arts, he seeks, and probably not in 

 vain, for the remains of primitive European Allophylise. There it is 

 not improbable that both Phoenician and early Greek navigators have 

 left behind them evidences of their presence, such as he alone can 

 discriminate. There unquestionably was the home of the ante- 

 christian Celt, and of the Picts, the Scots, the Belgse, and other 

 races of disputed origin. There, too, the Roman not only abode for 

 upwards of three centuries, and left enduring memorials of his pre- 

 sence, but his sculptured tablets still attest the introduction by him 

 of legionary colonists, not only from Gaul, Germany, Spain, and 

 Italy, but from Asia Minor and Africa. Colonists from almost every 

 people who had been subdued by the Eoman arms were planted 

 among the subject Britons, and these not in indiscriminate colloca- 

 tion, but each nationality with its own station assigned to it, where 

 votive inscriptions and sepulchral tablets still guide the curious ex- 

 plorer to classify the remains he exhumes. There, too, in that same 

 historic soil, lie the remains of the old Scandinavian Viking, Dane 

 and Norseman, buried with the pomp of Pagan sepulture, that still 

 tells of his northern birth-land. 



As an example of the accuracy of the data thus open to investi- 

 gation : amid the beautifully executed plates of life-sized crania of 

 ancient Britons, Caledonians and Saxons, appear also more than one 

 of the Eoman conquerors. One of these was procured from a sculp- 

 tured stone sarcophagus, on the outskirts of the ancient Roman 

 Eburacum, or English York, around which lay numerous urns, patera?, 

 a terra-cotta lamp, and other remains of the foreign arts of the 

 Roman Colonist. The partially mutilated Sarcophagus, belong- 

 ing to the second, or at latest, the third century of our era. and 

 is an invaluable adjunct, alike for the purposes of the Antiqua- 



