4 
Proceedings of Royal Society of Edinburgh. 
length of the face, the bizygomatic and bigonial breadths, were 
taken with callipers of a simple type, while the height of the head, 
the auriculo-nasal and the auriculo-alveolar lengths were taken 
by means of Professor D. J. Cunningham’s craniometer ; all these 
measurements, therefore, were obtained directly, not by project 
tions or estimations. The statures given can only be approximate, 
as all my subjects were measured with shoes or boots on their feet, 
and I was obliged to extract a varying number of millimetres in 
accordance with the kind of footgear worn. 
The individuals measured are too few to make a rigid mathe- 
matical examination of the data regarding them legitimate, and 
they can give at best but an approximation to the race characters 
of the people of Thorshavn. With so small a series perhaps the 
rough and ready method of examination by the aid of means 
and extremes is the best, as having the least appearance of 
finality. 
The length of the head, as may be seen by the table, varies in 
the twenty adult men from 176 to 157 millimetres, while the 
mean of the series is 166, only - 5 less than the mean of the two 
extremes. Though the extremes in the breadth of the head are 
less divergent from one another than those of the length, their 
mean is more divergent from that of the series, the former ex- 
ceeding the latter by ‘9, and the variation is also greater. The 
mean index derived from these two measurements varies from 
86*8 to 76 '3; twelve of the men are brachycephalic, though five 
of these have an index between 80 and 81, while the remaining 
eight are mesaticephalic, only three being between 7 8 and 80 ; the 
mean, 80 ’6, is brachycephalic. If the skulls of these twenty men 
had been examined instead of their heads, it is probable that not 
more than four would have been brachycephalic, and that two 
would have been dolichocephalic ; the mean index would certainly 
have been mesaticephalic. The mean cephalic index of Dr 
Jprgensen’s series of thirty-three men above the age of twenty 
from the northern islands is 80*4, and the extremes are 75*4 and 
85 ’3; and the variation, as might be expected in a larger series, 
is slightly greater than in mine, while the difference between the 
mean of the series and that of the extremes is less. Taking the 
two series together, the mean is 80 *7, and the mean of the extremes 
