Page:The American Journal of Science, series 4, volume 4.djvu/241

Rh lateral flattening which gives to the ensemble of the cranium a pyriform aspect when seen from above. The posterior parietal region is flat from above downward to a degree no less remarkable. The occipital crest is very thick. The temporal crests do not come very near to the sagittal suture, but they are pro- longed downward and backward in such a way as to form a parietal super-mastoid crest which goes almost to form a junction with the occipital crest. I at first pointed out with some reserve this simian character after a photogravure in Mr. Dubois' memoir; but I am now no longer in doubt as to its reality. Finally the foramen magnum and the auditory meatus, which are missing, appear to have been situated a little farther back than in the human species.

As has been said above, human crania very inferior for their race sometimes approach more or less in volume and form to anthropoid crania. Professor Turner has also been able to show many exceptional human skulls that approach to a remarkable extent the skull from Java with reference to capacity, etc. But, if we suppose that collections of crania richer than those that we possess would permit us to find upon human crania all the characters of inferiority noticed on the Pithecanthropus and to a degree as pronounced, the skull from Java would present none the less this peculiarity: that it brings together a group of characters all of them the limit for the human race. It is the union of these characters that it behooves us to consider, all the more so that the coexistence of certain of these characters on the same skull is particularly interesting. Thus normal human crania can have an inferior capacity of 1000 cubic centimeters, but then these are pigmy crania, and they come up again with respect to the general form because they contain a brain relatively voluminous with reference to the stature; they have no right, so to speak, to that enormous frontal visor which is, among all races, the lot of individuals with powerful skeleton and brain relatively small, or of averred microcephalous individuals whose development of skeleton approaches the medium.

Besides, let us admit that a non-pathological human skull may be found in which are united all the "caractères limites" of the skull from Java; that would prove nothing against the hypothesis of Mr. Dubois, for such a skull would be always a very rare exception in any human race whatsoever, whereas, according to all probability, the one skull found in Java is not a rare exception in its race. And then this race is of the Pleistocene epoch, which of itself would give no ground for astonishment were its one known specimen morphologically