REPORT ON THE HUMAN CRANIA. 
107 
Davis collection contains nine specimens, the Museum of the College of Surgeons at 
least thirty, the Natural History Museum in Paris possesses upwards of thirty skulls, the 
Godeffroy Museum three ; eight are described in the account of the “ Novara ” Expedition, 1 
whilst individual specimens are in the Berlin and other museums. MM. de Quatrefages and 
Hamy do not give the measurements of the individual skulls in the Paris Museum, but 
only the average; they place the cephalic index of fifteen men at 73 *26, that of fifteen 
women at 72. More detailed measurements of seventy-two specimens are, however, given 
by Barnard Davis, Flower, Zuckerkandl, Krause, Rabl-Rlickhard, and myself, from -which I 
gather that only five specimens had a cephalic index of 80 or upwards; forty-one were 
below 75, and twenty-six between 75 and 79 both inclusive. The mean breadth index 
of the entire series was 74. The New Zealanders therefore incline to dolicliocephalism, 
and at least four are recorded with a breadth index below 70. 2 Not unfrequently in the 
skulls with the lower cephalic index the vertical index exceeded the cephalic, but there 
were so many exceptions that it cannot be regarded as the rule in them for the basi- 
bregmatic height to exceed the greatest breadth. The crania are not characterised by 
any marked projection of the upper jaw. The mean of my series, as already stated, was 
orthognathic, the mean of Prof. Flower’s measurements places his series of skulls on the 
verge between orthognathism and mesognathism. 
The traditions of the New Zealanders, the study of their language by several philo- 
logists, 3 and the observations on their external characters by Captain Cook and other 
voyagers have all combined to the conclusion that the Maoris are an offset of the great 
Polynesian race, and their traditions point to Samoa as the group of islands from which 
they had sprung. If this view of their origin be correct, then we should expect that 
their cranial characters would correspond with those of the people from whom they 
had originated. It is of course impossible to state with any precision at what date they 
had separated from their parent stock and settled in New Zealand, but this must have 
happened a number of centuries ago. We have already seen that the Polynesians living 
in the islands nearer to the equator, although they possess a large percentage of brachy- 
cephalic heads, yet have intermingled with them skulls of mesaticephalic and dolicho- 
cephalic proportions. To some extent this is doubtless in part due to comparatively 
recent intermixtures of the Melanesian and Polynesian races. But if, as I shall attempt 
to show immediately (p. 110), a Melanesian people had inhabited Polynesia prior to its 
colonisation by the yellow brown race, and had to some extent fused with it, then the 
New Zealand colonists would not have been pure Polynesians, but would have had a 
1 Zuckerkandl, op. cit. 
2 The remarkably elongated skull in the Museum of the College of Surgeons, with an index of only 62 -9, 
described by Prof. Huxley in his paper on two widely contrasted skulls ( Journ . Anat. and Phys., vol. i. p. 60, 1867), 
and which he thought might be a New Zealander, is now regarded by Prof. Flower (New Cat., p. 216) as more probably 
from the New Hebrides. It is not included in the above summary. 
The Transactions of the New Zealand Institute contain many valuable and instructive papers on the origin of the 
Maoris. 
