Notice of the Cranium of a Manganya Negro. 223 
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 maxillae ;* 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 
almost vertically upwards, and afiords 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 maxillse 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 maxillse, whilst in others the former are 
reduced to the state of very narrow bars of bone. 
