Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 42.djvu/328

 312 meso- or microdontal races in weight. Thus that of a male Australian exceeds that of the average Englishman in the proportion of 100:91.

To work this heavier jaw more powerful muscles are needed. In the average well-developed Englishman with perfect teeth the weight of the fleshy portion of the great jaw-muscles, masseters and temporals, is 60 grammes, while the weight of those as ascertained in two Australians was 74 grammes.

Correlated with this greater musculature a sharper definition of the areas for the attachments of the jaw-muscles is required. The muscular fascicles are approximately of uniform size in both microdonts and macrodonts, as the range of motion of the jaw differs little in different races; but when the skull is smaller on account of the smaller size of the brain which it contains, the temporal crest ascends higher on the side-wall. In the average Englishman the temporal crests at their points of greatest approximation anteriorly across the brows are 112 mm. apart, but in the Australian they are only separated by 103 mm.; the interstephanic distances in these two are respectively 132 and 114 mm.

The more powerful stroke of the mandibular teeth upon the anvil of the upper-jaw teeth in macrodonts renders necessary a proportionally stronger construction of the bases of support for the upper alveolar arch. In any skull this arch requires to be solidly connected to the wall of the brain-case to which the shock of the impact is ultimately transmitted, and in order to protect from pressure the delicate intervening organs of sight and smell, the connection is accomplished by the reversed arches of the infraorbital margins with their piers, malar and maxillary, founded on the frontal angular processes. These foundations are tied together by the strong supraorbital ridge, so that the whole orbital edge is a ring, made up of the hardest and toughest bone in the skeleton.

A twofold modification of this arrangement is required in the macrodont skull. The bony circumorbital ring becomes stronger, especially along its lateral piers, and also as the alveolar arch is longer, and consequently projects farther forward, its basis of support must be extended to meet and bear the malar and maxillary piers. But macrodonts are often microcephalic, and therefore the frontal region of the skull must be adjusted to form a foundation for this arch. In the average English male skull, held with its visual axes horizontal, a perpendicular dropped from the anterior surface of the fronto-nasal suture will cut the plane of the alveolar arch between the premolar teeth or through the first premolar. In an Australian skull the perpendicular cuts the horizontal plane at the anterior border of the first molar teeth.

It is obvious, therefore, that to insure firmness the piers of the