CANADIAN INSTITUTE.

EDITING COMMITTEE:

GENERAL EDITOR,

E. J. CHAPMAN.

I. Geology and Mineralogy: E. J. CHAPMAN, Prof. of Geology and Mineralogy, Univ. Coll. Toronto.

II. Physiology and Natural History: REV. WM. HINCKS, F.L.S., Prof. of Natural History, Univ. Coll., Toronto.

III. Ethnology and Archæology: DANIEL WILSON, LL. D., Prof. of History and English Literature, Univ. Coll., Toronto.

IV. Meteorology: G. T. KINGSTON, M.A., Director of the Magnetic Observatory, Toronto.

V. Chemistry: HENRY CROFT, D. C. L., Prof. of Chemistry and Experimental Philosophy, Univ. Coll., Toronto.

VI. Mathematics and Natural Philosophy: J. B. CHERRIMAN, M. A., Prof. of Natural Philosophy, Univ. Coll., Toronto.

VII. Engineering and Architecture: SANDFORD FLEMING, C. E.

The Canadian Journal is printed exclusively for gratuitous distribution among the Members of the Canadian Institute, and such Institutions and Societies as the Council may determine; but Members may purchase extra copies at 2s. 6d. per number, and Provincial Literary and Scientific Societies may obtain the Journal at the same rate, by an annual payment in advance.

Communications for the Journal to be addressed to the General Editor, PROFESSOR CHAPMAN, University College, Toronto.

THE CANADIAN JOURNAL.

NEW SERIES.

No. XXVIII.-JULY, 1860.

NOTICE OF A SKULL BROUGHT FROM KERTCH, IN THE CRIMEA.

BY DANIEL WILSON, LL.D.,

PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND ENGLISH LITERATURE, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, TORONTO.

Read before the Canadian Institute, January 21st, 1860.

The Anglo-French campaign of 1855 in the Crimea, led to a general familiarity with much concerning that remarkable peninsula, of which we were in ignorance before. Its geography, its ethnology, and its antiquities all attracted attention; and rewarded research by novel disclosures; and its ancient history acquired a fresh interest, and received new illustrations from the investigations of the half obliterated remains of its long extinct past. Among its ancient historical sites, which, owing to peculiar circumstances, received a large share of attention, that of Kertch is, on various accounts, the most remarkable. Built on the site where, some 500 years before Christ, the Greek city of Panticapæum was founded, it was the centre of an area rich with memorials of the strangely chequered past, which has seen the same spot successively occupied by Milesian Greeks, Romans, Huns, Tartars, Genoese, Turks, and Russians. The Russian occupation of the Crimea dates only from a late period in the eighteenth century, but since then, a Museum had been formed in VOL. V.

the town of Kertch, in which were preserved many historical antiquities of the Crimean Bosphorus; and especially sepulchral relics recovered from the tumuli which abound on the site of the ancient Milesian colony.

Learning from an old fellow-student that he was about to proceed to the Crimea to join the Army Medical Staff, I wrote to him, drawing his attention to various objects worthy of observation; and in directing his notice to the treasures accumulated in the Museum at Kertch, specially requested him to note for me-should opportunity offer, the characteristics of an ancient Macrocephalic skull preserved there. It is referred to in Captain Jesse's "Notes of Travel in Circassia and the Crimea," where it is said to have been found in the neighbourhood of the Don. The interest of such cranial remains increases in value, from the evidence they furnish of ancient analogies to the remarkable artificial compression which now we associate almost exclusively with American crania

It chanced, as is now well known, that, in the fortunes of war, the town of Kertch fell into the hands of the Anglo-French invaders; and some few of its ancient treasures were preserved and transmitted to the British Museum. By far the greater portion of the Museum collections however, were barbarously spoiled by the rude soldiery; and among the rest doubtless perished the little-heeded relic of the Macrocephali of the Crimea, first described by Hippocrates, five centuries before our era. Blumenbach has figured in his first Decade, an imperfect compressed skull, received by him from Russia, which he designates as that of an Asiatic Macrocephalus; and in 1843, Rathke commmunicated to Müller's “Archiv für Anatomie," the figure of another artificially compressed skull, also very imperfect, but specially marked by the same depression of the frontal bone. This example is described as procured from an ancient burial-place near Kertch in the Crimea; and no doubt other illustrations of the peculiar physical characteristics of the ancient Macrocephali of the Bosphorus will reward future explorers, when the attention of those engaged in such researches, or eveu in ordinary agricultural labours on the site, is specially directed to the interest now attaching to them.

Meanwhile, however, my hopes of obtaining any further facts from the Macrocephalic cranium seen by Captain Jesse in the Kertch Museum, had been dissipated by the dispersion and wanton destruction of its treasures; and I had ceased to think specially of Crimean

crania, when I was gratified by receiving the gift of a skull, including the lower jaw, brought from Kertch, and described by the donor, as that of a Circassian lady. In form it presented no correspondence with the Macrocephalic type to which my inquiries had been previously directed, for the forehead is markedly vertical, and in its general proportions it is strikingly characterised as a brachycephalic cranium of unusual width at the parietal protuberauces, while marked by much delicacy and beauty, especially in the facial bones.

A special interest attaches to the evidences of physical form, as well as of philological characteristics, pertaining to the tribes of the Caucasian area, owing to the factitious importance that has been assigned to certain of them in modern Ethnology. It may not, therefore, be altogether valueless to put on record the facts connected with the recovery of the Crimean cranium in question; and to note the peculiarities of its form and measurements; though, from the mixed: character of the population of Kertch it would not be safe to assign the crania of its modern cemetery to any absolute ethnological group, or to make them the basis whereon to found data for classification, or for any comprehensive generalization.

Dr. Latham, in his " Varieties of Man," classes the nations and tribes of the area within the range of Mount Caucasus under the generic designation of Dioscurian Mongolidæ, including in its chief divisions: The Georgians; the Lesgians; the Mizjegi; the Irôn;. and the Circassians. He derives the term Dioscurian, from the ancient sea-port of Dioscurias, where the chief commerce between the Greeks and Romans and the natives of the Caucasian range took. place. According to Pliny, it was carried on by one hundred and! thirty interpreters, so numerous were the languages; and one striking characteristic of the locality, still noticeable, is the great multiplicity of mutually unintelligible tongues. This therefore is the idea designed to be conveyed by the term Dioscurian. Caucasian would have been a preferable, because more familiar and precise term, but it has been already appropriated as an Ethnological division, in a way sufficiently confusing and indefinite, without adding thereto by the creation of such a contradictory union of terms, as would arise from such a designation as Caucasian Mongolidæ,-almost equivalent, in popular acceptation, to European Asiatics!

The use of both epithets, Caucasian and Mongolian, is traceable to Blumenbach, and the history of his adoption of the former supplies