82 
THE VOYAGE OE H.M.S. CHALLENGER. 
tlie north to New Zealand in the south. This race is distinguished by its light brown 
or somewhat yellow skin, straight black hair, and scanty beard. To these a third race 
has been added by the name of Mikronesians, which occupies the Pelew, Caroline, 
Marshall, and Gilbert Islands, scattered in the north-western parts of the Pacific. By 
many ethnologists these people are not regarded as a distinct type or race, but as a 
mixture of the Mahori with the Malay, and in a less degree of Papuan, Negrito, 
Chinese, and Japanese elements. 1 The Challenger collection included crania both of the 
Papuan and brown Polynesian races, but none from the islands of the Mikronesian 
group. 
The description by Prof. Moseley of the Admiralty Islanders (p. 52) makes it quite clear 
that in the black-brown colour of the skin of the adults, and in the frizzled hair, which 
formed a dense mop, these people presented Papuan characters ; though, as regards the hair 
on the face, bushy whiskers and beard seemed to be the exception. 
If their crania be compared with those of the Australians they will be found to differ 
both in general appearance and in many characters which can only be arrived at by 
the use of cranio-metrical methods. Thus the Australian skulls were heavier, with thicker 
walls, stronger ridges and processes for muscular attachment, much more projecting 
glabella and supraciliary ridges, with consequently a much deeper depression at the fronto- 
nasal suture, and the appearance of a more receding forehead. Further, the summit of 
the cranium in the Australians was roof- shaped, and exhibited more distinctly an ill-filled 
character. Both races were dolichocephalic. When the corresponding measures of the 
skulls of the Admiralty Islanders and of the Australians measured by myself are 
compared, it will be seen that the mean length-breadth index was equal in the two peoples, 
but whilst the males were somewhat higher than the females in the Admiralty Islanders, 
they were below them in the Australians. The vertical index was higher (72) in the 
Admiralty Islanders than in the Australians (70) ; but whilst the difference in the two 
sexes was very slight in the Australians, it was marked in the Admiralty Islanders, the 
males being 73, the females 70. Both races were microcephalic as regards their cranial 
capacity, but whilst the Australians, both male and female, were on the average micro- 
cephalic, the mean of the male Admiralty Islanders was mesocephalic. The Australian 
crania were distinctly phsenozygous, the Admiralty islanders as a rule were cryptozy- 
gous. The Australians were less prognathous than the Admiralty Islanders. The nasal 
index was higher in the Australians than in the Admiralty Islanders, so that whilst the 
former were platyrhine, the latter were on the line between the leptorhine and mesorhine. 
In both peoples the orbital index was mesoseme, but in the Admiralty Islanders it was 
slightly higher than in the Australians, in whom it was on the verge of microseme. The 
palato-maxillary index was higher in the Admiralty Islanders than in the Australians ; 
in the latter it was dolichurauic, in the former mesuranic. 
1 See Mr. A. H. Keane’s Appendix, p. 617, to Wallace’s Australasia, already quoted. 
