CRANIOLOGY OF THE ABORIGINES OF TASMANIA. 387 



chocolate-brown colour, though varying in its depth of tint ; in the Tasmanians it was 

 more definitely black, though from the recorded descriptions it varied in shade of colour. 

 In the Australians the upper jaw was more prognathic, the lips were thicker, and the 

 teeth were larger and stronger than in the Tasmanians. 



As the skull furnishes important criteria for discriminating the physical characters 

 of races, I purpose, in the next place, to institute a comparison between the skulls 

 of the Tasmanians and those of the Australians and the other races in the Pacific 

 area with which they have been compared. I have made use for this purpose 

 of the representative collection of skulls in the Anatomical Museum of the Univer- 

 sity, for the most part formed during my tenure of office in the chair of Anatomy, 

 and to which valuable additions have subsequently been made by my successor 

 Professor Cunningham. 



In my memoir " On Human Crania " in the " Challenger " Reports # I described the 

 characters of forty-nine Australian skulls then in the Anatomical Museum, and com- 

 pared them with the descriptions by Barnard Davis, Flower, De Quatrefages and 

 Hamy, of the skulls in their collections. 



The cranial vault in the Australians is strongly roof-shaped, though in some specimens 

 from South Australia it is more flattened at the vertex. The parietal eminences are not 

 specially prominent ; the side walls approach the vertical ; the crania are unusually long, 

 the mean glabello-occipital diameter of twenty-three adult males being 191*6 mm.; 

 they are relatively narrow in relation to the length, and the mean parieto-squamous 

 breadth is 132 mm., which yields a cephalic index 68 "8. The male crania, in the mean, 

 are hyper-dolichocephalic ; so that if one were to see a skull in a collection catalogued 

 Australian, one would doubt the accuracy of its identification, if the cephalic index 

 computed from the maximum length and breadth was in the higher or even the middle 

 term of the mesaticephalic group. It is unnecessary for me to enter again into an 

 examination of the relative breadth and height of the Australian crania, as they have 

 been so fully detailed in my " Challenger" Report. It may be sufficient to state that 

 from an analysis of one hundred and fifty crania in both sexes, in which these diameters 

 were taken either by myself or by previous observers, the height was less than the 

 breadth in fifty-one, these dimensions were equal in fifteen, and the height was greater 

 than the breadth in eighty-five. Owing to the importance attached by Topinard, De 

 Quatrefages and Hamy to the special characters of the cranial vault in the Tasmanians, 

 on which I have dwelt in my description of the skulls in the Edinburgh and other 

 Museums, pp. 368, 376, I have re-examined the vault in sixty-one Australian skulls 

 now in the University Museum. In forty -four from Queensland, New South Wales and 

 Victoria, an antero-posterior depression on the parietal bone was only faintly indicated 

 in a small minority, and scarcely perceptible on the frontal bone ; whilst a sinking of 

 the hinder part of the sagittal suture between a pair of feeble lateral ridges was only 

 occasionally present. In nine skulls from South Australia four showed a parieto-frontal 



* Part xxix., 1884 ; and part xlvii., 1886. 



