Ethnie Significance of the Human Skull. 281 
slaves from the privilege of distorting the heads of their off- 
spring, so that the normal head is with them the badge of 
servile inferiority. Mr Davis has figured a distorted skull of 
an aged French woman in his collection, believed to have been 
the inmate of a lunatic asylum in one of the Southern Depart- 
ments of France. It is produced in illustration of the most 
usual variety of deformation, denominated by MM. Foville 
and Gosse the téte annulaire; but though of somewhat 
brachycephalic proportions, there is nothing in the profile view, 
which is the only one given, calculated to suggest the idea of 
abnormal configuration. 
From the various aspects which this craniological depart- 
ment of physical ethnology thus discloses to the inquirer, it 
becomes obvious that it is a greatly less simple element of 
classification than was assumed to be the case by Retzius, 
Morton, or any of the earlier investigators of national forms of 
the human skull. To the brachycephalic and dolichocephalic 
types of Retzius have now been added the kumbecephalic, the 
platycephalic, and the acrocephalic ; and to the disturbing 
element of designed artificial compression, it is apparent we 
have also to add that of posthumous distortion as another 
source of change, affecting alike the mature adult, even when 
old age has solidified the calvarium into an osseous chamber, 
from which nearly every suture has disappeared, and the im- 
mature foetus, in which adhesion of the plates of the skull has 
scarcely begun. When more general attention has been di- 
rected to this element of abnormal cranial development, addi- 
tional illustrative examples will no doubt be observed by crani- 
ologists; and the circumstances under which they are found 
will help to throw further light on the peculiar combination 
of causes tending to produce such results. 
On some Phenomena connected with the Drifts of the Severn, 
Avon, Wye, and Usk. By the Rev. W. 8. Symonps, F.G.S,, 
Rector of Pendock, Worcestershire. * 
Last February I delivered an address, at the request of Sir 
Charles Hastings and the Council, before the Natural History 
* Read at the meeting of the British Association at Manchester, Sept. 1861. 
