9 
mentioning the single fact that the common damson will not come to per- 
fection off the Fuller's earth, and therefore grows nowhere so well as in the 
districts where the subsoil consists of this formation. Natives of those 
districts regard damsons grown on other soils as worthless, however good 
they may appear to those who are not familiar with the fruit in its 
favourite habitat. 
III. 
The Anthropology op the Lower Danube. 
By John Beddoe, M.D., M.A.I. 
Read at the General Meeting on April ith, 1872. 
[Abstract.] 
The countries in the basin of the Lower Danube are inhabited by people 
belonging to three or perhaps four races — Germanic, Sclavonic, Magyar, 
and (doubtful) Roumanian or Wallach. It is not likely that these or any 
of them, unless the old Dacians were Sclavonic, inhabited the countries 
they at present occupy 1,800 years ago, when the first fragmentary notices 
of the districts and their population occur in the classic writers, who, 
instead of making or recording careful observations upon them, set them 
all down in a word as barbarians, on account of their ignorance of the 
Greek and Roman tongues. From Caesar's Commentaries we learn that 
Ariovistus was a foreigner in Gaul and had crossed over from the opposite 
(eastern) bank of the Rhine. But no very long time elapsed before the 
Germans, following his steps, began to press southward against the Roman 
Empire. Among others the Gepidae settled on the Danube and held the 
passages or ferries of that river, taking toll from the Sclavonic tribes 
whenever they wished to pass southward for plunder or conquest. But 
across the Teutonic and Sclavonic wave, advancing from the North, there 
rolled another from the East. The Avars, a Turkish race, passed from 
Asia into Europe over the steppes lying north of the Black Sea, and pressed 
westward, subjugating the Gepidse, destroying most of them, and meeting 
the Lombards on their way southwards towards Italy. These Avars possessed 
skulls naturally of a very peculiar form, and this form was exaggerated 
by compression^ until the head had a deformed appearance owing to the 
