Address to the Department of Anthropology (Biological Section) of the British Association : Bristol, August 25, 1875 / by George Rolleston.

  • Rolleston, George, 1829-1881.
Date:
1875
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Address to the Department of Anthropology (Biological Section) of the British Association : Bristol, August 25, 1875 / by George Rolleston. 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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    tree), of this country, and of Denmark, being so closely alike. The well-known monoxylic coffin from Gristhorpe contained, together with other relics closely similar to the relics found at Treenhoi, in South Jutland, in a similar coffin a skull which, as I can testify from a cast given me by my friend Mr. Id. S. Harland, might very well pass for that of a bracliycephalic Dane of the Neolithic period. Canon Greenwell discovered a similar monoxylic coffin at Skipton, in Yorkshire; and two others have been recorded from the same county—one from the neigh- bourhood of Driffield, the other from that of Thornborough. Evidence, again, is given by Colonel Lane Fox’s opinion that the earthworks which form such striking objects for inquiry here and there on the East-Riding Wolds must, considering that the art of war has been the same in its broad features in all ages, have been thrown up by an invading force advancing from the east coast. Now we do know that England was not only made England by immigration from that corner or angle where the Cimbric Peninsula joins the main land, but that long after that change of her name this country was successfully invaded from that Peninsula itself. And what Swegen and Cnut did some four hundred and fifty years after the time of Hengist and Horsa, it is not unreasonable to suppose other warriors and other tribes from the same locality may have done perhaps twice or thrice as many centuries further back in time than the Saxon Conquest. The huge proportions of the Cimbri, Teutones, and Ambrones are just what the skeletons of the British Round-Barrow folk enable us now to reproduce for ourselves. It is much to be regretted that from the vast slaughters of Aquae Sextiae and Vercellae, no relics have been preserved which might have enabled us to say whether Boiorix and his companions had the cephalic proportions of Neolithic Danes, or those very different contours which we are familiar with from Saxon graves throughout England, and from the so-called “ Danes’ graves ” of Yorkshire. Whatever might be the result of such a discovery and such a comparison, I think it would in neither event justify the application of the term “ Kymric ” to the particular form of skidl to which Retzius and Broca have assigned it. Some years ago I noticed the absence of the bracliycephalic British type of skull from an extensive series of Romano-British skulls which had come into my hands; and subsequently to my doing this, Canon Greenwell pointed out to me that such skulls as we had from late Keltic cemeteries, belonging to the comparatively short period which elapsed between the end of the Bronze Period and the estab- lishment of Roman rule in Great Britain, seemed to have reverted mostly to the prce-Bronze dolichocephalic type. This latter type, the “ kumbeceplialic type ’’ of Professor Daniel Wilson, manifests a singular vitality, as the late and much lamented Professor Phillips pointed out long ago at a Meeting of this Association held at Swansea^the dark-haired variety, which is very ordinarily the longer- headed and the shorter-statured variety of our countrymen, being represented in very great abundance in those regions of England which can be shown, by irrefragable and multifold evidence, to have been most thoroughly permeated, imbibed, and metamorphosed by the infusion of Saxons and Danes, in the districts, to wit, of Derby, Leicester, Stamford, and Loughborough. How, and in what way, this type of man, one to which some of the most valuable men now bearing the name of Englishman, which they once abhorred, belong, has contrived to reassert itself, we may, if I am rightly informed, hear some discussion in this department. Before leaving this part of my subject I would say that the Danish type of head still sur- vives amongst us ; but it is to my thinking not by any means so common, at least in the Midland counties, as the dark-haired type of which we have just been speaking. And I would add that I hope I may find that the views which I have here hinted at will be found to be in accord with the extensive researches of Dr. Beddoe, a gentleman who worthily represents anti upholds the interests of Anthropology in this city, the city of Prichard, and who is considered to be more or less dis- qualified for occupying the post which I now hold, mainly from the fact that he has occupied it before, and that the rules of the British Association, like the laws of England, have more or less of an abhorrence of perpetuities. The largest result which craniometry and cubage of skulls have attained is, to mv thinking, the demonstration of the following facts, viz.:—first, that the cubical contents of many skulls from the earliest sepultures from which we have