elongating so much that, probably, its capacity is not diminished. The
majority of skulls possessing these characters, which I have seen, are
from the neighbourhood of Port Adelaide in South Australia, and have
been used by the natives as water vessels; to which end the face has
been knocked away, and a string passed through the vacuity and the
occipital foramen, so that the skull was suspended by the greater part
of its basis.

FIG. 30.--An Australian skull from Western Port, in the Museum of the
Royal College of Surgeons, with the contour of the Neanderthal skull.
Both reduced to one-third the natural size.

Figure 30 represents the contour of a skull of this kind from Western
Port, with the jaw attached, and of the Neanderthal skull, both reduced
to one-third of the size of nature. A small additional amount of
flattening and lengthening, with a corresponding increase of the
supraciliary ridge, would convert the Australian brain case into a form
identical with that of the aberrant fossil.

And now, to return to the fossil skulls, and to the rank which they
occupy among, or beyond, these existing varieties of cranial
conformation. In the first place, I must remark, that, as Professor
Schmerling well observed ('supra', p. 300) in commenting upon the Engis
skull, the formation of a safe judgment upon the question is greatly
hindered by the absence of the jaws from both the crania, so that there
is no means of deciding with certainty, whether they were more or less
prognathous than the lower existing races of mankind. And yet, as we
have seen, it is more in this respect than any other, that human skulls
vary, towards and from, the brutal type--the brain case of an average
dolichocephalic European differing far less from that of a Negro, for