570 Proceedings of Royal Society of Edinburgh. [sess-. 
if not altogether, restricted to the tribes living on the Gulf of 
Papua. 
No skull described in this communication was metopic. In two 
skulls a broad tongue-like process of the squamous temporal 
reached the frontal, and cut off the ali-sphenoid from the parietal. 
In three specimens there were epipteric bones. Four skulls had 
small Wormian bones in the lambdoidal suture, in a fifth specimen 
a large triquetral bone was situated in the right half of the suture. 
One skull had a third condyle. In several skulls the inner wall of 
the orbit was broken, but in the uninjured specimens the small 
size of the os planum of the ethmoid was noted, and in one of 
these I observed this plate to be triangular in form, and that a 
tongue-shaped process of the orbital plate of the superior maxilla 
intervened between the os planum and lachrymal and articulated 
with the frontal. Some years ago I figured this variety in a Bush- 
man’s skull (pi. 1, fig. 4, Challenger Reports, 1884), and I have 
since seen it in the skull of a man from the Lushai Hill tracts to 
the north of Burma. It is obviously a rare variety even in the 
crania of savage races. 
Through the courtesy of Dr A. B. Meyer of Dresden, I received 
on July 19th a valuable and interesting memoir, “On the distribu- 
tion of the Negritos in the Philippine Islands and elsewhere,”* 
which he has recently published. In the course of this Memoir 
he discusses the question of the characters of the people of New 
Guinea; is this island, he says, inhabited by a uniform race, the 
Papuan, or is the Papuan a mixed race? Especially, do Negritos 
exist in New Guinea by the side of, or amongst the Papuan popu- 
lation, and can Negritos be racially distinguished from Papuans? 
In reply he regards the Negritos and Papuans as one race, which 
exhibits considerable variability in its physical characters. The 
differences in the form of the skull and the stature do not weigh, 
he says, against' the uniformity in so many other respects, and it is 
not necessary to look upon brachycephaly and dolichocephaly 
as constant factors in the determination of racial features. He 
assumes that certain races vary more in this character than in 
others. In the course of his argument he refers to my description 
* Stengel & Co., Dresden, 1899. 
