70 Professor D. Wilson’s Illustrations of the Significance 
modern American crania, as well as of the British brachy- 
cephalic class already described. Nor are such changes of 
the natural form necessarily limited to skulls of short lon- 
gitudinal diameter, in which this typical characteristic is 
exaggerated by the pressure of the cradle-board in infancy. 
Now that this source of modification begins to receive 
general recognition among craniologists, its influence is 
assumed as a probable source of the most diverse aberrant 
forms. Dr Thurnam, when referring to two skulls of dif- 
ferent shapes, recovered from the same group of British 
barrows, of ‘fa somewhat late though pre-Roman period,” 
on Roundway Hill, North Wiltshire, thus indicates their 
contrasting characteristics, and suggests the probable source 
of such divergence from the supposed British type: ‘ The 
general form of the cranium (plate 43) differs greatly from 
that from the adjoiming barrow (plate 42). That approaches 
an acrocephalic, this a platycephalic form ; that is eminently 
brachycephalic, this more nearly of a dolichocephalic charac- 
ter. As the eye at once detects, the difference is much greater 
than would be inferred from a mere comparison of the mea- 
surements. The respective peculiarities of form in the two 
skulls may possibly be explained by supposing that both 
have been subject to artificial deformation, though of a dif- 
ferent kind,—the one appearing to have been flattened on 
the occiput, the other showing a depression immediately 
behind the coronal suture over the parietal bones, which 
seems to indicate that this part of the skull was subject to 
some habitual pressure and constriction, perhaps from the 
use of a bandage or ligature tightly bound across the head 
and tied under the chin, such as to this day is employed in 
certain parts of the west of France, producing that form of 
distortion named by Dr Gosse the sincipital, or ¢éte bilobée.”* 
The influence of the recognition of this source of change is, 
indeed, very manifest throughout the fifth Decade of the 
“Crania Britannica.” Anextremely brachycephalic skull of 
a youth, obtained from a barrow on Ballard Down, Isle of 
Purbeck, is described as unsymmetrical, and as affording 
‘“ tolerably clear evidence that this form, if not always pro- 
duced, was at least liable to be exaggerated by an artificial 
* Crania Britannica, Dec. v. pl. 43. 
