1894-95.] Prof. Sir Wm. Turner on Pithecanthropus erectus. 423 
of the Australian aborigines, which are flattened on the vertex, and 
to crania belonging to the people of Denmark during the Stone period. 
He regarded it as a human skull forming the lowest term of a series 
leading gradually upwards to the best developed human crania, 
and stated that the Neanderthal man was in no sense intermediate 
between man and apes. 
In a paper which I read to this Society thirty-one years ago,* I 
compared the Neanderthal skull with a number of specimens both 
of savage and British crania in the Anatomical Museum of the 
University. I showed that the Neanderthal characters are closely 
paralleled in skulls of existing savage races, and even in occasional 
specimens of modern European crania ; and that the large transverse 
parietal diameter compensated for the brain space lost by the re- 
treating forehead and flattened occiput. Shortly after the publi- 
cation of this paper. Dr — now Sir Arthur — Mitchell presented me 
with a calvaria found in Aberdeen, whilst digging the foundations 
of Gordon’s Hospital, which is built on the site of the Blackfriars 
Monastery with which a burial-ground had been connected. This 
specimen confirmed, in a very striking manner, the demonstration 
which I had previously given. f The conclusion above arrived at is 
now so generally accepted, that anthropologists not unfrequently 
refer to specimens of the crania of both savage and civilised races, 
which they are examining, as possessing Neanderthaloid characters. 
Subsequent to the discovery of the Neanderthal skull, other crania 
have been obtained which exhibit approximately similar characters. 
Two of the most remarkable of these were procured along with 
other bones of the skeleton, in 1886 , in a terrace at the mouth of a 
cave at Spy, Belgium, and have been described by MM. Fraipont 
and LohestjJ who regard them as belonging to the same race as the 
man of the Neander Valley. Associated with these skeletons were 
bones of existing mammals, and of the extinct Rhinoceros Uchorinus 
and mammoth, also examples of worked flints. They came to the 
conclusion that whilst the men of Spy had possessed a number of 
pithecoid characters to a greater extent than in any other human 
* Abstract in Proc. Boy. Soc., Edinburgh, January 18, 1864, and in extenso 
in Quart. Jour, of Sc., April 1864. 
t The calvaria was described and figured in the Quart. Jour, of Sc,, October 
1864. 
X BccJierches etlinographiqucs sur Us ossements humains, &c. Gand, 1887. 
