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Dazedly awhile he surveyed the grinning trio of witnesses to his discomfiture; then, picking up his battered head-piece he crammed it down upon his bald cranium with a vicious, yet abject, gesture. "Th' missis seems onwell this mornin'," he mumbled apologetically to Slavin, "I take it yore not a married man, Sarjint?" "Eh?" ejaculated that worthy sharply, his levity gone on the instant. "Who me?"
Elsewhere we have shown that an ape-man with a cranium of two-thirds normal capacity must have lived at least 20,000,000 years ago, one third the period of animal existence; or even 166,666,666 years ago, if we accept a later claim that life has existed 500,000,000 years.
Nothing could be more admirable than the mechanism by which each one of the bones is enabled to fulfill the manifold purposes for which it was designed. We have seen how the bones of the cranium are united by sutures in a manner the better to allow the delicate brain to grow, and to afford it protection from violence.
In the absence of the jaws, then, any judgment on the relations of the fossil skulls to recent Races must be accepted with a certain reservation. But taking the evidence as it stands, and turning first to the Engis skull, I confess I can find no character in the remains of that cranium which, if it were a recent skull, would give any trustworthy clue as to the Race to which it might appertain.
And not only is this constant, simultaneous growth and decay of body and mind to be observed, but we know that mental functions are disordered and suspended by various physical conditions. Alcohol, many drugs, fever, disorder the mind; a blow on the cranium suspends its functions, and the 'spirit' returns with the surgeon's trepanning. Does the 'spirit' take part in dreams?
Jennings mentions an instance of extensive fracture of the skull, 14 pieces of the cranium being found. The patient lived five weeks and two days after the injury, the immediate cause of death being edema of the lungs. His language was incoherent and full of oaths.
His grizzled hair was brushed in a waving line across a cranium which was ochre in tone. He assumed the air and manner of a party leader, of a man who was preparing to drive out the enemies of France, the Bourbons, on short, to beat of drum.
The patient, a workman of twenty-nine, while cutting down a gum-tree, was struck by a branch as thick as a man's arm, which fell from 100 feet overhead, inflicting a compound comminuted fracture of the cranium. The right eye was contused but the pupils equal; the vertex-wound was full of brain-substance and pieces of bone, ten of which were removed, leaving an oval opening four by three inches.
I cocked my eye on the nigger's head, and saw that it was one of those wedge-shaped cocoanuts so peculiar to people of African descent; so I inwardly resolved to hit him on one side of his wedge-shaped cranium. The nigger had his face to the sun, so that I felt confident that I could hit him pretty near where I wanted to.
All sorts of tests of this kind have been suggested. Cranium, cranial sutures, frontal process, nasal bones, eye, chin, jaws, wisdom teeth, hair, humerus, pelvis, the heart-line across the hand, calf, tibia, heel, colour, and even smell all these external signs, as well as many more, have been thought, separately or together, to afford the crucial test of a man's pedigree.
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