Abstract
Bulletins dela Socété d' Anthropoiogie de Paris, tome iii. fasc. 2 (1880).—M. Robin, Inspecteur primaire du Département de Loir-et-Cher, has laid before the Society his scheme for obtaining important anthropological measurements by the help of teachers of schools. The proposed questions, with a full description of the various appliances by which such measurements could be taken, have been submitted to the consideration of a special commission.—M. J. Parrot's paper on the development of the brain in infants, considers the subject chiefly in reference to the modifications of colour which the medullary substance undergoes.—The present number of these Bulletins gives M. P. Broca's remarks on his “goniomètre flexible,” of the various parts of which drawings are appended.—M. Harmand makes the interesting communication that some Cambodian inscriptions, hitherto undeciphered, have been found by Prof. Kern, of Leyden, to be Sanskrit, written in Kawi and Kalinga characters.—M. Vinson suggested that fixed rules should be drawn up for the transcription of foreign words, and should form part of the official anthropological instructions provided for travellers and explorers in savage countries. His suggestion has been accepted. —In addition to the article already referred to on the flexible goniometer, these Bulletins contain several papers from the pen of the late M. Paul Broca, which will be read with the more interest as being among the last of his communications to the Society; these are his post-mortem reports of the appearances presented in the thorax of a young Zulu girl, with his remarks on aretrogressive anomaly in the aorta of this girl; a description of the appearances of the cranium of the assassin Prevost, more especially with reference to the assumed importance of the protuberance between the occipital and parietal, to which Gratiolet applies the term calotte and which he regards as a simian character. M. Broca considered that in the interests of physical science it would be desirable that greater facilities should be afforded to scientific men for obtaining the heads of those who die in public prisons, asylums, & c. Finally we have the report of M. Broca's remarks on the case of an illiterate boy of eleven, possessed of extraordinary powers of calculation, and evincing surprising facility in extracting cube-roots. The consideration of this case gave additional interest to the discussion that had been raised at an earlier meeting, in regard to Galton's observations on the vision of serial numbers.—M. Moudiere has drawn up a monograph on the women of Cochin-china, in which he has embodied the results of six years' laborious anthropological researches. The three races of Anna-mites, Cambodians, and Chinese, of which the Cochin-china population is composed, were severally studied.—M. Bertillon gives the results of his comparative analysis of the statistical tables of suicides for France and Sweden. The results show singular accord between the two countries, and the author considers himself justified in maintaining that they establish the two following laws:—I. That widowers commit suicide more frequently than married men. 2. That the existence and presence in the house of children diminishes the inclination to suicide both in men and women.—M. Rene de Semallé gives a comparative table of the mean length of the generations of mankind, based on the genealogy of the reigning and other princely families in Europe. From these it would seem that the period of thirty years, which in common parlance is accepted as that of a generation, very closely corresponds with the means obtained from these genealogical data.—M. Fourdrignier gives the result of his exploration of the double tumuli found at Thuizy, near Rheims, among a large number of other graves in which only onelndiyidual had been interred. Where these graves have escaped earlier spoliation, the hum an remains and the broken fragments of ornaments found in them would appear to show that the individuals buried together were of different sex. M. Fourdrignier has made an interesting discovery of the several parts of two conical casques. The fragments of these singular head-coverings were extracted from two of the double graves, and, according to their discoverer, they belong to a Gallic race of the pre-Roman period, and must in form have closely resembled the modern German “Pickel-haube.”
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Scientific Serials . Nature 22, 575–576 (1880). https://doi.org/10.1038/022575c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/022575c0