STUDIES IN CRANIAL VARIATION. 
FRANK RUSSELL. 
THERE are a number of characters of infrequent occurrence 
in the human cranium that are said to have considerable impor- . 
tance as criteria of race. The morphological significance of 
some of them is not yet known. The present study is almost 
wholly statistical; it has been carried out upon a collection of 
Amerindian crania which are not so well known as those of 
Old World peoples. Nearly two thousand skulls in the Pea- 
body Museum at Harvard University were examined. Many 
of these are in a fragmentary condition, so that the number 
available for the study of one character may be very different 
from that of another, e.g., statistics relating to the metopic 
suture may be tabulated when the frontal bone alone is present, 
but those relating to the hard palate can be reckoned only 
upon skulls that are nearly complete. | 
Metopic Suture. — The median frontal suture (Fig. 1) closes 
normally in the infantile skull during the second year. It 
remains open throughout life, however, in a certain number of 
cases that is fairly constant for each of the main divisions 
of mankind. This percentage of open mietopic suture varies 
widely in the different groups, as, for example, between 
Europeans (8.7 per cent) and Australians (1 per cent). The 
morphology of metopic crania has been exhaustively treated 
by Dr. Papillault,!. who has shown that they are higher and 
broader, in a word have greater capacity than the normal. 
The percentage of occurrence of the metopic suture in the 
adult crania of the Peabody Museum collection is seen in the - 
table on the following page. 
Tympanic Exostoses.— There is a tendency in all races 
toward the formation of bony tumors or exostoses in the 
[4 
1 Pan; 
Papillault, Dr. G. La suture métopique, etc., Mém. Soc. d'Anth., T. ii, 
et. 3» fas. Y: 
737 
