REPORT ON THE HUMAN CRANIA. 
57 
was especially marked in the upper half or so of the coronal suture, and in the more 
anterior part of the sagittal. In only two specimens, C and G, were the sutures beginning 
to disappear from senile changes, and in C the molars showed more than in any other 
skull the effects of use on the crowns. In all, the basi-cranial synchondrosis was ossified. 
No skull was metopic. In each of the two lower jaws the coronoid process was feeble 
and the sigmoid notch was shallow. In one the chin was feeble, in the other it was more 
massive, rounded at its lower border and projected forwards. 
In E and I a broad tongue-like process of the squamous temporal was interposed 
between the left ali-sphenoid and the anteroinferior angle of the parietal. An epipteric 
bone was situated on the right side of E, between the ali-sphenoid and parietal, and 
two large epipterics were placed in K between the left ali-sphenoid and parietal. On the 
right side of D a single epipteric was situated in the spheno-parieto-frontal suture, but it 
did not entirely cut off the ali-sphenoid from the parietal. H had a similar bone in the 
spheno-parietal suture. In the other skulls the pterion was normal, though in G the 
spheno-parietal articulation was very small. One or more Wormian bones were present in 
the lambdoidal suture in A, B, D, E, F, H, and K ; in the last of which they were 
large and infringed considerably on the area of the parietal bones. In H a small 
triquetral bone was in the sphenoido-frontal suture. 
The male skull K exhibited a rare and interesting irregularity in the ossification of 
the cranial bones ; for in it the right parietal was completely but unequally separated 
into an upper and a lower division by an antero-posterior suture, situated in the position 
of the temporal ridge, and extending from the coronal to the lambdoidal suture. This 
suture was much denticulated, and had an os triquetrum in its posterior third. The 
vertical diameter of the upper division of this parietal bone, midway between the coronal 
and the lambdoidal sutures, was 81 millimetres, and of the lower division only 42 mm. 
A large Wormian bone in the lambdoidal suture infringed upon the posterior part of the 
upper division. The left temporal ridge of the same skull was well marked, and in 
proximity both to its anterior and posterior ends was a faint appearance of a suture as 
if the left parietal also had been separated into an upper and a lower division at an 
earlier period of life. In the course of my anatomical experience, during which many 
hundreds of human crania have passed through my hands, I have only seen one other 
specimen in which a similar division of the parietal bone occurred, and this was in 
the right parietal of a foetus, between the eighth and ninth month, dissected by Dr. 
Ramsay H. Traquair, who described it in the Natural History Review. 1 
Cases of division of the parietal have, however, from time to time been recorded by 
other anatomists. Winslow 2 and von Doeveren 3 had each in their possession in the last 
century, and von Sommerring 4 described in the earlier part of the present century, a 
1 1863. vol. iii. p. 132. 2 See Tarin's Osteographie, Paris, 1753. 
3 Specimen Observ. Acad. Groningre, 1765, quoted by Wenzel Gruber. 
4 Tiedeinann and Treviranus's Zeitschrift fiir Physiologic, s. I., Tafel I., 1826. 
(ZOOL. CHALL. EXP. — PART XXIX. — 1884.) Ff 8 
