48 
THE VOYAGE OF H.M.S. CHALLENGER. 
South Australia proper contributed twenty-two crania. Of these, seventeen 
specimens had the vertical index less than the cephalic, viz., ten males and seven 
females ; the crania came from the neighbourhood of Adelaide, Port Augusta, Lake 
Alexandrina, the Milang tribe, and the Coorong tribe. Two, a male and a female, had the 
cephalic and vertical indices equal. In three males, from Fowlers Bay, Adelaide, and 
Port Augusta, the vertical index was greater than the cephalic. 
It would appear, therefore, that in this large and varied series only two skulls 
occurred, collected to the north of the latitude of the southern boundary of Queensland, 
viz., a female from Cape York, and a male from Alexandra Land, in which the vertical 
index was less than the cephalic. On the other hand, from south of that latitude, a 
considerable number of crania possessing this character have been obtained. Victoria, 
N. S. Wales, and South Australia proper, but more especially the last named, have 
furnished the greater number. But along the whole southern seaboard, from Perth on 
the west to Gipps Land on the east, and more particularly in the district near Adelaide, 
dolicho-platycephalic skulls have been procured. The proportion which South Australia 
has furnished is so large that, of the twenty-two skulls from that colony, seventeen had the 
vertical index less than the cephalic, and two others had these indices equal . 1 
The question therefore now arises, is this difference in the relations of the two indices 
so marked and so constant that the people in whom it is found are either to be regarded 
as a race differing from those who do not possess this character, or that it is merely 
sexual. As regards its relation to the two sexes, it was not limited to the one or 
the other. Of the series of thirty-three crania exhibiting this character, probably 
seventeen were males and sixteen females, and in the South Australian group of these, 
ten were males and seven females. It is therefore so nearly equally manifested in the 
two sexes, that it cannot be said to distinguish one sex more than the other. It is more 
difficult to pronounce definitely as to its value in the discrimination of racial differences. 
Its great relative frequency in the tribes of the southern seaboard points to the 
conclusion that, in the natives of this part of the coast-line, a genetic tendency existed to 
develop skulls exhibiting this character. 
But it would not be safe to state that, because of this difference in the single character 
of the relation of the breadth to the height of the skull, those with a vertical index 
lower than the cephalic were therefore of a different race from those whose vertical 
index was higher. And this the more so when we find that the relations of breadth 
and height are not constant in the people of the same district. Thus, of the four 
1 Since the above was written I have read M. Cauvin’s paper in the Bull, de la Soc. d’Anth. de Paris, March 1883, 
on the races of Oceania, in which he argues that, owing to diversities in the details of structure in the Australian skulls, 
that race is not pure hut mixed. He gives a table of the cephalic, nasal, and orbital indices of fifty-two crania from 
different parts of the island, but he does not refer to the height index, so that I cannot utilise his table in connection 
with the question of dolicho-platycephalism. Some of the skulls he has measured are mesaticephalic, others 
brachycephalic. 
