1898-99.] Sir W. Turner on Sculptured Skulls , New Guinea. 553 
Decorated and Sculptured Skulls from New Guinea. 
By Professor Sir Wm. Turner, D.C.L., F.R.S. (Plates 
I. -VI.) 
(Read July 3, 1899.) 
The ten skulls to which I would direct attention this evening 
were collected in the island of New Guinea. The first to come into 
my possession was given to me in 1895 by one of my pupils, Mr F. 
N. Johnston,* the nine others have been recently purchased from 
dealers. I am not able to name the tribe or tribes by whom 
the skulls had been sculptured, neither can I state the precise 
locality at which they were obtained • but the dealer from whom I 
bought eight specimens told me that they came from the Purari 
River district. This river rises in the range of the Albert Victor 
Mountains, and after a known course of 130 miles, it discharges 
its waters by several mouths into the head of the great gulf of 
Papua, f It is said to be the largest river in the British territory, 
next to the Fly River, j 
In a valuable memoir by Messrs Dorsey and Holmes, on a 
collection of sixteen decorated skulls from New Guinea, published 
in 1897, the authors state § that although they cannot give the 
locality from which the specimens came, it is probable that they 
were collected on the northern shore of the Papuan Gulf, in the 
British Protectorate. Mantegazza and Regalia have figured IT a 
skull from Canoe Island in the Fly River, where the frontal bone 
was sculptured with four concentric circles. Professor Haddon, 
in his elaborate memoir || on the Decorative Art of New Guinea ,. 
* I have figured and described this skull in the Journal of Anatomy and 
Physiology , April 1898, vol. xxxii. p. 353. 
t Briiish New Guinea , by Sir Wm. Macgregor, London, 1897. 
X The mouths of this river were recognised by the Rev. James Chalmers, 
Work and Adventure in New Guinea , p. 143, et seq., 1885, but he did not. 
ascend the main stream or give it a name. 
§ Field Columbian Museum, Anthropological Series, vol. ii. No. 1, Chicago, 
August 1897. 
IT Archivio per V Antropologia e la Etnclogia, vol. xi. pi. iii., 1881. 
|| Cunningham Memoirs of the Royal Irish Academy , Dublin, 1894. 
YOL. XXII. . 27/7/99 2 N 
