Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 18.djvu/771

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THE BLACK RACES OF OCEANICA.
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tal. The most marked characters in the face are the thickness of the external orbital processes, the forward projection of the cheek-bones, the depression of the root of the nose, the shortness and breadth of the nose, and the mode of termination of the bridge of the nose, which, instead of forming an angle, is prolonged into a kind of a gutter. The jaws are narrow and the branches of the dental arch tend to be parallel. The palatal vault is deep; and the prognathism is very

Fig. 10.—Bust of a Tasmanian.

great, the mean alveolar facial angle being 64°, but the massive teeth are less oblique than the alveolar part.

In the women the prominences of the brows nearly disappear, while the parietal bosses are more accentuated. The forehead and the lower occipital bone are more swollen; the antero-posterior curve is relatively depressed, although the skull continues to show the form of a roof. The prognathism of the face is more marked, and the teeth are more inclined than in the men.

The second Australian type, the dolichoplatycephalic or Neanderthaloid type, although it is less widely diffused than the other, is nevertheless of very great interest to anthropologists. In it there exist, as Huxley has already remarked, individuals and even a whole race, although it is disappearing, that present the cranial forms of which the Neanderthal man affords the most pronounced example. We are