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Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. [Sess. 
enabled to prove that a skull in the Zurich collection alleged to be that of 
a Maori was not a Maori skull, but that of an Australian aboriginal. 
It must not be supposed that in adopting Mollison’s method we are 
breaking new ground. His method has already been adopted by Czeka- 
nowski (15) for the solution of a problem almost precisely similar to that 
with which we are confronted — namely, the racial affinities of the Central 
African pigmies ; by Oppenheim, in his “ Zur Typologie des Primaten- 
craniums ” (16) ; and by Radlauer (17) ; and we believe that we are correct 
in stating that all these authors have accepted the correctness of Mollison’s 
methods and have abided by the conclusions to which that method led them. 
In fig. 4 the Tasmanian is taken as the basis. The 32 morphological 
observations made by us upon the cranium are indicated by the numbers 
1 to 27, and the letters A to E, inclusive. The centre line in that figure 
labelled “ Tasmanian average ” is supposed to represent the average values 
for these 32 observational counts on the Tasmanian cranium. At an 
arbitrary distance from this centre line are drawn two parallel lines which 
indicate the maximum and minimum ranges of variation of the Tasmanian 
from the average, and which are uniformly treated throughout as being 
equal to 100 per cent. The Australian “ variation index ” is plotted in for 
each of the 32 counts of the investigation, and is indicated in the figure by 
the dotted line. It will be clearly evident that the Australian “ variation 
index” falls altogether within the Tasmanian maximum and minimum 
ranges of variation, thus proving conclusively, according to Mollison, that 
Australian and Tasmanian are one and the same race. 
Mollison, in the paper already referred to, speaking of his variation 
index, says, “ Schon fur die Yergleichung in einem einzelnen Merkmal ist 
dieses Verfahren zweckmassig. Sien voller Wert zeigt sich aber erst dann, 
wenn wir eine grossere Reihe von Merkmalen vor uns haben, bezuglich 
deren wir die Stellung des Individiums zu der Grupp beurteilen sollen.” 
As Mollison is clearly of opinion that his method will always furnish 
more accurate results if the procedure be made to include as large a number 
of observations as possible, we have thought it desirable to supplement 
these 32 morphological observations of the form analysis of the skull by an 
additional series of craniological observations specially recorded by us on 
both Australian and Tasmanian for this special purpose and which have 
little or nothing to do with the form analysis of the skull. 
These additional observations are 14 in number as given on page 146, 
and have been specially selected by us for two reasons : firstly, because 
they have nothing to do with the measurements and angles concerned in 
our investigation of the form analysis of the skull ; and secondly, because 
