been practised, affording only implements made of bone and stone. The skulls of these bodies are said to be divided by the coronal suture into two equal parts, of which the posterior is broader than the anterior. They are remarkably small, globular, and almost round; the upper jaw and the nasal bones project considerably in front. They are chiefly distinguished from the skulls of other races by the low and much depressed forehead. Eschricht, as stated before, describes the skull from the Hünengräbern of Denmark in similar terms. A. G. Masch refers to a skull of this character, found in an ancient grave in the Island of Moen, which is figured in the "Dag," a Danish newspaper of the 15th September, 1835, as well as to a skull found near Fehrbellin,[1] which would appear to possess all the characters of that from Plau, and had probably been used as a drinking vessel. J. Ritter[2] also gives an account of a large barrow near Plau, in which the skull lay a foot higher than the rest of the skeleton, and it appeared as if the body had been placed in the sitting posture. The forehead of this cranium is described as remarkably flat. Human skeletons in the squatting posture have been found in ancient graves in France and Germany, as well as in Scandinavia. Tschudi, it is well known, brought mummies of this kind from Peru; and Trogon observed the same thing in the most ancient burial-places in the Canton Wallis. The skulls from Plau and the frontal bone from Schwaan, which present a conformation resembling that of the Neanderthal cranium, bear, however, but a distant resemblance to the two frontal bones from Pisede, also preserved in the Grand Duke's collection at Schwerin. One of these frontal bones is thick, with protuberant supraorbital ridges, a low retreating forehead, and the temporal ridge rises very high, reaching the sagittal suture; in the second frontal bone, the supraorbital ridges are level, but the glalella is remarkably prominent, and the forehead rather more arched. An ancient cranium in the same collection, found at some depth in the moor of Sülz, and of which I have been furnished with a plaster cast by Dr. Lisch, is of an abnormal and very peculiar form; it is small and elongated, and, when viewed laterally, remarkably round; the forehead is narrow, but well arched, the supraorbital ridges small, but protuberant; the sutures open, and the line of the sagittal suture raised into a sort of keel, as in the so-termed "boat-shaped" skulls; the occiput is very projecting, with a long pointed spine.
In conclusion, the following propositions may be regarded as the result of the foregoing researches:—
The fragments of crania from Schwaan and Plau, on account both of their anatomical conformation and of the circumstances under which they were found, may probably be assigned to a barbarous, aboriginal people, which inhabited the North of Europe before the Germani; and, as is proved by the discovery of similar remains at Minsk in Russia,
