of certain Ancient British Skull Forms. 73 
is not in itself a discovery of much significance. . But it 
reminds us how essentially man, even in the most degraded 
state of wandering savage life, differs from all other animals. 
The germs of an artificial life are there. External appli- 
ances, and the conditions which we designate as domesti- 
cation in the lower animals, appear to be inseparable from 
him, The most untutored nomades subject their offspring 
to many artificial influences, such as have no analogy among 
the marvellous instinctive operations of the lower animals. 
It is not even unworthy of notice that man is the only ani- 
mal to whom a supine position is natural for repose; and 
with him more than any other animal, when recumbent, 
the head is necessarily placed so as to throw the greatest 
pressure on the brain-case, and not on the malar or 
maxillary bones. Without, therefore, running to the ex- 
treme of Dr Morton, who denied, for the American Con- 
tinent, at least, the existence of any true dolichocephalic 
crania, or, indeed, any essential variation from one assumed 
typical form, it becomes an important point for the crani- 
ologist to determine, if possible, to what extent certain 
characteristic diversities may be relied upon as the inherited 
features of a tribe or race; or whether they are not the 
mere result of artificial causes originating in long per- 
petuated national customs and nursery usages. If the 
latter is, indeed, the case, then they pertain to the materials 
of archeological rather than of ethnological deduction, and 
can no longer be employed as elements of ethnical classi- 
fication. 
Every scheme*of the craniologist for systematising ethni- 
cal variations of cranial configuration, and every process of 
induction pursued by the ethnologist from such data, pro- 
ceed on the assumption that such varieties in the form of 
cranium are constant within certain determinate limits, and 
originate in like natural causes with the features by which 
we distinguish one nation from another. By like means 
the comparative anatomist discriminates between the re- 
mains of the Bos primigenius, the Bos longifrons, and other 
kindred animal remains, frequently found alongside of the 
human skeleton,-in the barrow; and, by a similar crucial 
comparison, the craniologist .aims at classifying the crania 
NEW SERIES.—VOL. XVIII. NO. 1.—JULY 1863. K - 
