GENERAL SUMMARY. 
It is perhaps scarcely necessary that I should remind the reader that the one hundred 
and forty-three crania described and tabulated in this Report are from aboriginal people, 
living in a state of uncivilisation, in Southern Africa, Southern America, Australia, and 
the islands of the Pacific Ocean. That they are uncultivated aborigines is, however, 
a fact which should not be lost sight of in connection with this general summary of their 
characters. 
In the first place I shall refer to noteworthy individual peculiarities observed in these 
crania. No skull was metopic, though in a young male Australian, a Loyalty Islander, 
and in two New Guinea skulls traces of the frontal suture were seen in the glabella, and 
in the Mallieollese it extended as high as the ophryon. The non-persistence of the frontal 
suture in the adult skulls of savages has been referred to by other craniologists, and is to 
be associated with the growth in thickness and weight of the cranial walls, the compara- 
tive simplicity of the sutures of the cranial vault, and the tendency to ossification of the 
sutures in adult life, which can so well be observed in the skulls of Australians, Chatham 
Islanders, and African negroes. In no skull was the malar bone either wholly or partially 
divided into two by a suture . 1 Wormian bones were present in the lambdoidal suture in 
Puegian, Bush, Australian, Admiralty, Sandwich, Chatham, and Loyalty Islanders, Malli- 
collese and New Zealand crania ; in some cases they were of considerable size, and in one 
Chatham islander attained the magnitude of an interparietal bone. No specific ethnological 
signification attaches to the presence of these bones. I have seen large interparietal bones 
in many European crania, and the view that an interparietal bone, the os incse of Tschudi, 
had some special significance as a character of the Peruvian skull has now for many years 
been abandoned . 2 
In the crania of three Australians, two Admiralty Islanders, two Sandwich Islanders, 
1 Much stress has been laid by Prof. Rolleston on division of the malar bone in the Bush skull (account of Bush 
skulls in his collected papers, op. cit.). In his memoir, as well as in Prof. Wenzel Gruber’s monograph, Ueber das 
zweigetheilte Jochbein, Wien, ] 873, a copious bibliography may be found. Subsequently Dr. A. B. Meyer has communi- 
cated to the Berlin Anthropological Society (Zeitschr. f. Ethn. Bd. xiii. p. 330, 1881) a paper on this subject. He has 
met with two skulls, a Parisian and a Saxon, in 898 crania examined. 
2 See my paper, On some Congenital Deformities of the Human Cranium, Edinburgh Medical Journal, July and 
August 1865. 
