REVIEWS CRANIA BRITANNICA. 447 



ownership in the old burial mounds and cists of the British Isles. 

 Here are engraved the primitive cinerary urns and domestic pottery 

 from the ancient British Barrows of Staffordshire and Derbyshire, 

 and the rude stone cist of Juniper Green, near Edinburgh. The 

 flint implement of Ballidon Moor Barrow, tells of the rudest barbar- 

 ism of Britain's primeval night ; while at the same time such sepul- 

 chral architecture as the Gloucestershire chambered and galleried 

 tumulus of Uley, the Derbyshire cist and megalithic mound of 

 Parsley Hay Low, or the cist and superincumbent urn-chamber of 

 Ballidon Moor, reveal the mode of thought of an era, analogous in its 

 constructive ideas to that which gave birth to the pyramids and cata- 

 combs of the Nile valley. Another era succeeded, of the arts of 

 which, the bronze dagger of End Low Barrow, Derbyshire, and the 

 horse furniture, glass beads, and personal ornaments of the York- 

 shire Barrows, furnish striking illustration ; and then we come to the 

 Iron umbos and spearheads, and the ponderous sword, of the Saxon 

 Graves of Salisbury and Gloucester, the situla and cinerary urns of 

 Linton Heath, Cambridgeshire, and with these the curiously orna- 

 mented glass vase, the fibula?, and the toilet implements of Saxon 

 times. Between the first and last of these, the era of Theodorianus 

 intervenes, with the sculptured and inscribed Sarcophagi, the classic 

 pottery and other intruded foreign arts of Roman Yorkshire ; and> 

 later than all, the Dane and Norseman tell, by Bunic inscriptions 

 and sepulchral hoards of the implements and the weapons of Northern 

 Europe, how another, and yet another wave of colonization, mingled 

 the diverse races of Europe with the elder colonists of the British 

 Isles. 



Such is the rich field of Ethnological research which Dr. Thur- 

 nam and Mr. Davis have undertaken to explore and to illustrate, 

 with the added feature of accurate and critical descriptions and 

 drawings of the osteological remains. The work is to be published 

 in six " Decades," of which two only have appeared, embracing as yet 

 incompleted chapters, and partially apportioned illustrations to some 

 of the completed descriptions. Some of the most important questions 

 that have recently attracted the attention of British Ethnologists 

 and Archaeologists, are expressly reserved for discussion at the close, 

 and even of those which may be assumed to be completed, such as 

 the interesting and suggestive one from the pen of Mr. Davis, on 

 " Distortions of the Skull," it is to be anticipated that further illus- 

 trations may incidentally occur during the progress of the work. It 

 would obviously, therefore, be premature to anticipate the final de^ 



