REPORT ON THE HUMAN CRANIA. 
41 
refers also to ten male skulls, which he measured in the Army Medical Museum at 
Netley, with a mean index of 72, and he lays down the general proposition that 
the average cranial index of the Australian skull is 72, or slightly less, and that 
they are therefore to be placed among the most dolichocephalic of races. 
The mean cephalic index of the thirty-one adult crania measured in this Eeport was 
only 70, that of the twenty males 69 ; of the eleven females 72, but one of the female 
skulls had an index of 78, and it may be a question if this woman was of pure aboriginal 
blood. My average is therefore less than that of the above observers, which is to be 
accounted for in part by a considerable proportion of my crania possessing so great an 
antero-posterior maximum, in part by two of the skulls being unusually elongated, 
apparently by premature sagittal synostosis, but still more by my longest measurement 
always including the glabella, which formed so marked a projection in the majority of 
the male skulls, and by including which the dolichocej)halic character of the crania 
is necessarily increased. My observations agree with those of my predecessors in giving 
to the female Australian skull a higher length-breadth index than to the male skull. 
The mean basi-bregmatic height of forty-five specimens (apparently of both sexes) 
referred to by MM. de Quatrefages and Hamy (p. 323) was 135 mm. The fourteen 
male skulls of the coast tribes, in their 29th Table, had the same average height, whilst 
the ten females were only ]31; the four males from the interior again were 141, the 
females 133 ; whilst of their dolicho-platy cephalic group of crania, the four males were 
only 124 mm., but the three females were 127. They place the mean vertical index of 
the whole series of forty-five crania at 73*36, whilst that of the series of thirty-eight 
skulls recorded in their 29th Table is 71 '7. the males being 70'3, the females 73*1. I 
have extracted from Prof. Flower's catalogue the basi-bregmatic height of thirty-nine males 
and of twenty-four females. The mean height of the former is 133 mm., that of the 
latter 126 '5 mm. Prof. Flower himself places the vertical index in the male skulls at 
72, in the female at 71'1, and in the whole series at 71*5 ; but in the ten male skulls in 
the Netley Museum the mean is 74. 
If the vertical index in my series of crania be compared with that obtained by the 
above observers, it will be seen to be less than theirs, viz., 70*4 as against 717 and 71'5, 
which is without doubt owing to the glabella being included in my antero-posterior 
maximum but not in theirs. My observations accord with those of Prof. Flower in 
giving to the females a less vertical index than to the males, and we are both in marked 
contrast to the computations of MM. de Quatrefages and Hamy, in whose 29th Table the 
height index of the females exceeds that of the males in the proportion of 73*1 to 70 '3. 
This statement by the French craniologists is so opposed to the experience of others that 
one is tempted to ask if in the drawing up of their table some error has not accidentally 
been made in their computations. 
Prognathism, as estimated by the relative proportions of the basi-nasal and basi- 
(ZOOL. CHALL. EXP. PART XXIX. — 1884.) Ef 6 
