ACROSS UNKNOWN SOUTH AMERICA 
had rested on burning matter — evidently lava or lapilli. 
The skull measured longitudinally forty-eight centimetres 
and was twenty-three centimetres broad. Seen from 
underneath it resembled a much elongated lozenge. 
Although I searched a great deal, I could not find the 
lower mandibles of these two skulls, nor loose teeth, but 
many indeed were the fossilized fragments of bones of 
other animals strewn all over the hill-top. I found up 
there quite a sufficient quantity to make the summit of that 
hill look of a whitish colour. That was why I had been 
attracted to it at first sight, and had climbed it in order 
to discover why it was so white. One immense bone, 
fractured, was the pelvis of the larger animal. Nearly 
all those fossils were in very poor preservation, much 
damaged by fire and water. Some were so eroded as to be 
quite unidentifiable. 
Most interesting of all to me were two smaller skulls 
— one of a mammal not unlike a leopard or jaguar, the 
other of an ape or perhaps a primitive human being. The 
latter cranium, like all the others, had one side completely 
destroyed by hot lava, which in this instance had also filled 
up a considerable portion of the brain-case. The human 
skull was small and under-developed, no sutures showing; 
the forehead extremely low and slanting, almost flattened, 
with the superciliary region and glabella very prominent. 
One of the orbits (the right) was badly damaged. The 
left, in perfect preservation, was oval, very deep. The 
form of the palate was of a broad U-shape, abnormally 
broad for the size of the head. The upper jaw was fairly 
high and prominent, whereas the zygomatic arch on the left 
(the right was destroyed) was not unduly prominent, in 
fact, rather small and less projecting than the supra¬ 
orbital region. Of the nasal bone only just a fragment 
remained. The brain-case was small but well-rounded at 
the back, where it had comparatively a fairly good breadth 
behind the auditory meatus. 
326 
