Contour Diagrams of Human Crania

Abstract

IN the last number of Biometrika (viii., 1, 2, 1911) Prof. Karl Pearson has edited and published a very valuable paper by the late Dr. Crewdson Benington on cranial type-contours. The work is based on long series of skulls of various races, e.g. English of the seventeenth century (from the Whitechapel Plague Pit), modern English (Royal Engineers), various Negro races from the Congo, Guanche, Egyptian, Eskimo, and the prehistoric Cro-magnon skull. For each series three typical contours are selected, viz.:—(1) a “transverse vertical”, passing through the auricular points and the apex of the skull; (2) a sagittal or median section; and (3) a horizontal section through the glabella; and in each case all the individual skulls of a series are combined into a single “type” by a process of arithmetic averages. Lastly, the diagrams thus obtained are reproduced on tissue-paper, so that one may be superposed upon another, and the characteristic differences easily compared.