On the osteology and peculiarities of the Tasmanians, a race of man recently become extinct / by Joseph Barnard Davis.

  • Davis, Joseph Barnard, 1801-1881.
Date:
1874
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the osteology and peculiarities of the Tasmanians, a race of man recently become extinct / by Joseph Barnard Davis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    Dr. Topinard employed in his investigations in order to facilitate his description of the skulls and to aid his comparisons, a series of Parisian crania and another of Breton skulls. His inquiries also extended to the internal capacities of the crania, and the con- figuration of the brains they had contained, and his conclusions are these: „The anterior lobes of the brain have nearly the same relative development in the two series of skulls, i. e. the Tasmanians and the others. The anterior part of the pos- terior cerebral lobes is a little less developed in the Tasmanians. The posterior part is much less developed. The cerebellum is more voluminous in the Tasmanians, by a quantity approximately equal to the loss which the posterior cerebral lobes undergo”. And here I possess the plaster cast of the interior of the Tasmanian woman’s skull N°. 1763 * which gives the correct form and size of the brain. This shows a considerable fulness of the lobes of the cerebellum. This cast is nearly undistin- guishable from the figure given in the splendid Atlas of Dumoutier’s anthropological appendix to Dumont d’Urville’s Voyage 1). But contrary to Dr. Topinard’s observation, the posterior lobes of the cerebrum project decidedly farther back in my cast than in Dumoutier’s Tasmanian woman’s brain. The olfactory lobes also descend down more deeply. On ariving at the skeleton of the Tasmanian, who has been a man of about thirty years of age, with his mature dentition complete, N°. 1761 f of my collection, I propose, in order to bring out its peculiarities as clearly as possible, to compare it with another skeleton in my possession, that of a young Australian man of about twenty years of age N°. 1262 f. One of the most important general remarks to be made is that the bones are of the usual robustness seen in European skele- tons, in this respect quite different from those of the Australian, which are slender. In a former memoir, I endeavoured to indicate more precisely the gracility of the bones of Australians by measuring the circumference of the femar in the middle at its slenderest part 2). In the Tasmanian man it is 3.3 inches, or 83 mm. in the Aino woman it is exactly the same; whilst in the Australian woman of my collection N°. 1261f, it is only 2.7 inches or 67 mm. In the Aino race there is reason to think that the bones are unusually robust, and in the Australians unusu- ally slender; nevertheless in individual Australians this slenderness may not be so apparent. Whilst I believe the bones of Tasmanians may not be unusually robust, when compared with those of European skeletons, still they are moderately so, and the difference between them and those of Australians cannot be overlooked. *) Yoyage au Pol Snd. Anthropologie PI. 47. -) Description of the skeleton of an Aino woman, etc. J. B. Davis. Mem. of the Anthrop. Soc. of Lond. III. 21. With figures.