Notice of the Cranium of a Manganya Negro. 228 



traders attacked the people, murdered the males, and carried 

 the women and children captive. To quote Dr Living- 

 stone — " The Shire Valley, where thousands lived at our 

 first visit, was now converted into a valley of dry bones. 

 One cannot now walk a mile without seeing a human 

 skeleton, or open a hut in the now deserted villages without 

 seeing the unburied skeletons lying there." 



Of the crania of these people which Dr Kirk brought with 

 him, five specimens are deposited in the Hunterian Museum, 

 London ; a sixth is the one now exhibited to the Society. 



From the general appearance of the skull — from the 

 open condition of the cranial sutures, more especially the 

 want of ossification of the basi-cranial synchondrosis — from 

 the perfect state of the teeth which are erupted — from the 

 third pair of molars in the lower jaw being completely con- 

 cealed within their alveoli — and from the corresponding teeth 

 in the upper jaw only beginning to protrude — the skull is 

 evidently that of a youth, probably of one not more than 

 18 years of age. The sex, as the filed condition of the 

 incisor teeth indicates, is the male. The skull, in some of 

 its features, affords an illustration of some of the characters 

 of the negro cranium: the nasal region is broad and flattened, 

 the breadth being about equally divided between the nasals 

 and ascending processes of the superior maxilke ;* the nasal 

 orifice is large, and approaches the quadrilateral in form ; the 

 upper jaw projects strongly forward in the region of the in- 

 cisive teeth, and the prognathism is still further increased by 

 the downward and forward slope of these teeth. In the frontal 

 region there is an almost complete want of supra-orbital 

 ridges and glabella, and the ascending part of the frontal 

 bone, instead of at once sloping backwards, passes at first 

 nhnost vertically upwards, and affords space for the develop- 

 ment of the frontal lobes of the brain. The parietal region is 

 well formed, and slopes somewhat abruptly downwards pos- 



* The relative proportion in which the nasals and superior maxilla; contri- 

 bute to the production of the broad flattened nose of the negro, varies con- 

 siderably in the crania of different individuals. In some the two nasals con- 

 tribute much more than the superior maxilla), whilst in otliers the former are 

 reduced to the state of very narrow liars of bone. 



