CHAPTER XXIII 
HEADS ANCIENT AND MODERN IN PROFILE 
It is more than six years now since Colonel Willoughby 
Verner brought me, from a cave in Spain, some 
fragments of a human skeleton. They were still thickly 
encrusted by the stalagmite which covered the floor of the 
cave, and when struck they resounded exactly as if they 
had been made of porcelain. They were petrified— true 
fossils. Colonel Verner discovered the cave ; it had 
never been explored before — at least in modern times. 
On the walls were crude hieroglyphs. Nothing was 
found to give a clue to the date at which the cave had 
been inhabited or when the human remains came to be 
deposited there. Among the few fragments were the 
upper ends of both right and left thigh bones of a small 
person, probably under 5 feet (1500 mm.) in height, 
truly human in shape, but with peculiar features which 
were new to me. It was therefore important to find out 
more about this individual — to discover the characters of 
the head — but all that was available for this purpose were 
the left temporal bone, the hinder half of the left parietal 
bone, and a fragment of the right. My attempt to 
reconstruct the skull from these fragments taught me a 
great deal. I saw that it would be possible to reconstruct 
the whole skull from these fragments with some approach 
to accuracy, but before such a task could be carried out a 
new method of studying skulls must be first elaborated, 
and then applied. The same problem confronted me 
when I obtained the cranial fragment found near Bury 
St Edmunds. It came to be a matter of great import- 
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