Page:Natural History Review (1861).djvu/178

166 well as two others found in the same locality. To the same category he also refers the skulls disinterred, together with stone implements, near Meudon and Marly, in the year 1845, by M. Serres. Retzius, also, in his memoir on the form of the cranium of the northern populations, states that the supraorbital eminences are strongly developed in the existing Swedes, Slaves, and Finns; Huech says the same with respect to the Esthonians. In the Lapps this prominence is absent, or very slightly marked, as is the case also with the natives of Greenland. In the latest catalogue of the collection formerly belonging to Dr. Morton, the following skulls are enumerated as presenting a remarkably developed supraorbital region:—No. 21, that of an English soldier of Celtic type; No. 1200, of a Norwegian; and No. 1537, of a Finn, both from casts by Hetzius; lastly, No. 1512, the skull of an aboriginal American, found by Davis and Squier in the valley of Scioto, Ohio, in a rude stone sepulchre; this cranium is of a rounded form, with high vertex; No. 1533, the skull of a Calmuc; and No. 1558, that of an Esquimaux.

Now, when it is found from these numerous examples, that a marked prominence of the supraorbital region, traces of which can be perceived even at the present time, occurs most frequently in the crania of barbarous, and especially of northern races, to some of which a high antiquity must be assigned, it may fairly be supposed that a conformation of this kind represents the faint vestiges of a primitive type, which is manifested in the most remarkable manner in the Neanderthal cranium, and which must have given the human visage an unusually savage aspect. This aspect might be termed brutal, inasmuch as the prominent supraorbital border is also characteristic of the facial conformation of the large apes, although in these animals the prominence in question is not caused by any expansion of the frontal sinuses. These sinuses have been found by Owen to be wholly wanting, as well in the Gorilla, as in two Tasmanian and an Australian skull, a circumstance which is in accordance with the weak bodily constitutions of these savages.

The reports which have reached us from Latin and Greek writers respecting the bodily constitution and manners of the barbarous populations of ancient Europe, receive an unexpected light from the discovery of crania of this kind. Even of the Germans, Cæsar remarks that the Roman soldiers were unable to withstand their aspect and the flashing of their eyes, and that a sudden panic seized his army. Of the Gauls,