The President's Address. 



17 



in them, on Tuesday. On this account I do not propose to describe 

 the villages now, but merely to mention the main anthropological 

 results which have a bearing on the subject of this address. They 

 are satisfactorily proved by the coins and all the contents to be of 

 Roman age, but of British construction. Contrary to all expectation 

 it was found that they were in the habit of burying their dead in 

 their villlages in pits which had been previously made for other 

 purposes, such as store houses or refuse pits, and of these pits one 

 hundred and ninety-one have been dug out in the two villages. 

 Twenty-eight skeletons were found in positions to prove that 

 they were those of the inhabitants of the two villages. By a 

 calculation from all the long bones it has been found that their 

 average stature for the males was 5ft. 2in., and for the females 

 4ft. lOin. This unexpected result shows that they were a remarkably 

 short race, shorter by 3in. than the short people of the long barrows, 

 whose average height, as already mentioned, was 5ft. 5in. The 

 average cephalic or breadth index, for the males and females to- 

 gether, was found to be 74, which, by a comparison with the 71 of 

 the long barrows, and the 81 of the round barrows, shows that in 

 head-form, no less than in stature, they approached the long barrow 

 people more closely than those of the round barrows, and the bodies 

 being mostly crouched up near the tops of the pits showed that 

 they had retained their ancient form of burial although the extended 

 bodies of a few of them implies a partial introduction of more recent 

 customs. The tibiae of some of these skeletons were also decidedly 

 platycnemic or flat-boned, more so than those of any existing 

 European race, which is an additional link of connection with the 

 earliest inhabitants of this country. But whilst the breadth index 

 of the heads stands intermediate between that of the long and 

 round barrow people, one or two of the skulls were markedly 

 brachycephalic or round-headed, reaching to 82, whilst one or two 

 others were hyperdolichocephalic or markedly long-headed, reaching 

 to 68, which exceptional extremes, according to the laws of heredity, 

 are precisely what we should expect on the supposition of a mixture 

 of two races. We may, therefore, assume as a working hypothesis, 

 until some more reasonable theory is devised, that these people were 



VOL. XXIV. — NO. LXX. C 



