12 



Human Skulls compared 



in every case much dwarfed as compared with the skulls of the 

 apes, which have the occipital ridge. 



In the adjoining plate I have figured the skulls of the three 

 higher apes — the gorilla, chimpanzee, and orang. 



The gorilla, it will be seen, has all three ridges enormously 

 developed ; the orang has only the occipital ridge conspicuous, 

 the brow-ridge being comparatively slight ; the chimpanzee has 

 neither the sagittal nor occipital ridges, and has the brow-ridge 

 much less prominent than the gorilla, though much more con- 

 spicuous than the orang. 



Application of the Foregoing Facts of Comparison, 



Having now rapidly compared the human skeleton with that 

 of those animals most nearly allied to man in their ' salient 

 features, I need hardly say that anthropologists, in tracing out 

 distinctions of race, and in noting degrees of inferiority between 

 one race of mankind and another, consider those races as the 

 most inferior which exhibit most emphatically the structural 

 characteristics of the apes, monkeys, or quadrupeds. 



Now, as the great superiority of the human organisation 

 consists in the greater development of the brain, the skull is 

 the structure in human beings of chief interest in an anatomical 

 comparison with the lower animals. 



Physical anthropology, therefore, concerns itself very much with 

 degrees of craniological development, as the shape and size of the 

 brain-case, the prominence or otherwise of the brow-ridge, the 

 temporal-ridges, or occipital protuberance, the lengths or direc- 

 tions of sutures between the bones composing the cranium, the 

 position of the occipital foramen, and such-like features. Then, 

 anthropology considers, with regard to the bones of the face, the 

 degree of prognathism, the degree of development of the chin 

 prominence, whether tending to obliteration, as in apes, or not ; 

 the form of the alveolar arches, the size of the canine teeth, the 

 proportions between the horizontal and upright parts of the 

 lower jaw, &c, &c, — in short, all those features that are on the 

 one hand most human, or on the other hand most simian. 1 



Locality of the Lowest Living Races. 



Anthropological science has succeeded in proving that, of the 

 human races now living, the lowest known are those occupying 

 inter-tropical Africa, Eastern Asia, the Malay-Archipelago, the 

 Pacific Islands, and Australia, for these have at once the greatest 

 degree of prognathism and the smallest brains. 



1 The expansion of this subject by a new deduct ive method is at present occu- 

 pying my attention. Appended to this paper is a brief statement of the me hod. 



