Bates oiled Sean 
56 Professor D. Wilson’s Illustrations of the Significance 
in this a male skeleton lay on its left side. The arms ap- 
peared to have been folded over the breast, and the knees 
drawn up so as to touch the elbows. The head had been 
supported by a flat water-worn stone for its pillow; but from 
this it had fallen to the bottom of the cist, on its being 
detached by the decomposition of the fleshy ligatures; and, 
as is common in crania discovered under similar circum- 
stances, it had completely decayed at the part in contact 
with the ground. A portion of the left side is thus want- 
ing; but with this exception the skull was not only nearly 
perfect when found, but the bones were solid and heavy; and 
the whole skeleton appeared to me so well preserved as to 
have admitted of articulation. Above the right. shoulder, 
a neat earthen vase had been placed, probably with food or 
drink. It contained only a little sand and black dust when 
recovered, uninjured, from the spot where it had been de- 
posited by affectionate hands many centuries before, and is 
now preserved along with the skull in the Scottish Museum 
of Antiquities. 
As the peculiar forms of certain skulls, such as are de- 
scribed by Dr Thurnam, from an Anglo-Saxon cemetery at 
Stone, in Buckinghamshire,* and another, described by me, 
from an Indian cemetery at Montreal,t as well as those of 
numerous distorted crania, from the Roman site of Uriconium 
and other ancient cemeteries, have been ascribed to posthu- 
mous compression, the precise circumstances attendant on 
the discovery of the Juniper Green cist are important, from 
the proof they afford that the body originally deposited 
within it had lain there undisturbed and entirely unaffected 
by any superincumbent pressure from the day of its inter- 
ment. ‘Two, if not three, classes of skulls have been re- 
covered from early British graves. One with a predomi- 
nant longitudinal diameter, in the most marked examples 
differs so essentially in its elongated and narrow forehead 
and occiput from the modern dolichocephalic head, that I — 
was led to assign it to a separate class under the title kum- 
becephalic.{ Another has the longitudinal diameter little — 
* Crania Britannica, Dec. i. p. 88. 
+ Edin. Phil. Journal, n. s., vol. xvi. p. 269. 
¢ Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, p. 177. 
