EEPOET ON THE HUMAN CEANIA. 
45 
Prof. Huxley’s, and agree with him in recognising an elongated and depressed skull as 
occasionally occurring in collections of Australian crania. This type they say is not 
widely diffused, and occurs especially in the Adelaide district, although specimens of a 
s imil ar kind have been procured from other coast tribes. To crania of this type, whether 
they occur in the Australian or other races, they have given the name of dolicho- 
platycephalic. In a subsequent chapter (p. 300 e.s.), whilst they regard it as undoubted 
that in some parts of Australia different ethnic types are accidentally juxtaposed, and 
more or less fused, yet that, judging by the crania, the Australians proper are none the 
less one race, and that the differences seen in the crania are sexual rather than ethnic. 
They give (p. 317) as an illustration of the dolicho-platycephalic type of skull a 
specimen presented by M. Erklund to the Museum Retzius (type No. 2). It differs, they 
say, from the ordinary type (No. 1) of Australian skull in having heavier supraciliary 
ridges, a much more depressed and more receding forehead, in a general flattening of the 
cranial vault, in a more considerable backward projection of the occiput, in a very abrupt 
change of curvature above the occipital protuberance, and in the almost complete liorizon- 
tahty of the base. This skull is markedly dolichocephalic. The antero-posterior diameter 
is 195 mm.; the greatest transverse diameter only 126 mm.; the basi-bregmatic diameter 
125 mm. The length-breadth index is 64 - 6, the vertical index 64’1. They contrast 
these indices with those of a skull belonging to the ordinary Australian type, No. 1, in 
which they are respectively 67'0 and 73'19. 
Prof. Flower in his Native Races refers to the collection of the College of 
Surgeons as containing a number of skulls belonging to a tribe from the neighbourhood 
of Adelaide of exceptionally depressed form, and in his Catalogue he gives their measure- 
ments as well as those of the other skulls in that collection. I have analysed his 
measurements of the Australian skulls, so far as regards the relative proportions of the 
cephalic and vertical indices, and find that of the sixty-four specimens, twenty-eight, viz. , 
eleven males and seventeen females, had the vertical index less than the cephalic ; six, 
viz., four males and two females, had their indices equal; whilst in thirty crania the 
vertical index was greater than the cephalic, and of these, twenty-two were probably 
males and eight females. 
In the Thesaurus Craniorum and Supplement thereto by the late Dr. Barnard Davis, 1 
the cephalic and vertical indices of the Australian skulls in his collection are recorded. 
I find that, after discarding those whose form had been altered by synostosis, or whose 
authenticity was somewhat doubtful, there remain twenty crania in which the relations 
of breadth and height to the length are stated. Of these seven, viz., five males and two 
females, had the vertical index less than the cephalic ; in one, a female, the two indices were 
equal ; and in the remaining twelve, eleven males and one female, the vertical index was 
greater than the cephalic. 
1 London, 1867 and 1875. 
