Abstract
Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, No. 6.—The present number gives a compendium of useful suggestions, which might advantageously be acted on in other countries besides Germany, addressed by the Anthropological Society of Berlin to all persons engaged in exploring, or other expeditions to distant regions. In those directions for observing and collecting whatever is most adapted to extend and rectify our actual knowledge, information is given in regard to the various races with whom travellers may come in contact, and the special geographical, linguistic, social and other conditions, which more particularly require further elucidation.—Prof. A. Bastian gives us in this number with his habitual completeness an exposition of the worship of the heavenly bodies among different nations, and the extent to which local conditions of climate and ethnological differences have influenced the character of the adoration offered to the sun and the moon and the stars. According to him a true worship of the sun—except in the polar regions—is only to be found on elevated plateaux, where the return of the orb of day was welcomed with gratitude after the colder night, while in low-lying tropical lands the aborigines looked with dread at the glowing ball of fire which each summer seemed to threaten their world with annihilation. We can strongly commend this paper as a most comprehensive, although not specially novel exposition of Aryan and other mythological systems.—The German engineer, Herr II. Keplin, has drawn attention to the mussel-hills (Casqueiros sambaquis) of Brazil in the district of the Rio do San Francisco do Sol. The position of these deposits appears to refute the idea of their being mere Kjokkenmödings, while the great respect shown by the natives for the dead, and their care to provide them proper sepulture, would seem to afford further evidence that these elevations, which often rise to a height of 50 feet, cannot bc due to the hand of man. In reference to the above, it may interest our own archæologists to know that Herr Walter Kauffman draws attention in the same number to his discovery in the neighbourhood of Hull, at a spot known as Castle Hill, near Holderness, of a burial place belonging, as he conjectures, to the transition period between the Stone and Bronze ages. Herr Kauffman found on the western side of the hill, where the ground had been cut for building purposes, a fragment of some loam vessel, a compact mass of oyster shells, some flint flakes, and a human rib. After carefully removing the earth, Herr K. discovered at from 4 to 4½ feet below the surface the vertebræ of another skeleton, and finally collected nearlyall the bones of two skeletons, completely enclosed in a mass of oyster shells.—Dr. A. B. Meyer, of Manilla, in the course of a short visit in the Philippines, found skulls which presented that peculiar appearance of sharpening or filing of the teeth, described by the old traveller, Thévenot, and the accuracy of which has often been called in question. The Negrito skulls from the Philippines, examined by Dr. Meyer, also exhibited the artificial flattening of the heads noticed by Thévenot.—Herr Virchow drew attention last summer to the fact that occasional deviations present themselves from the normal cranial configuration of a race, which ought to teach us extreme caution in regarding any single specimen as a typical form. He was led to make this remark by his observation in the Anatomical Museum of Copenhagen of the skull of Kay Lykke, a man of the noblest Danish descent, who had flourished two hundred years ago, and been celebrated in his day for his personal beauty, his effeminacy, and the sensual bias of his disposition. Yet the skull of this once elegant, accomplished, and self-indulgent courtier of the 17th century, belonging to an otherwise brachycephalic race, is more strikingly dolichocephalic and depressed than the Neanderthal head, and might readily be supposed to have belonged to an Australian savage. The cranial capacity which is given by Professor Panum, of Copenhagen, as 1,250 cubic centrm., is, moreover, below the amount that is conjecturally assumed for the Neanderthal skull.
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Scientific Serials . Nature 8, 17–18 (1873). https://doi.org/10.1038/008017a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/008017a0