Contributions to the craniology of the people of the empire of India / by Sir Wm. Turner.

  • William Turner
Date:
1899-1901
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Contributions to the craniology of the people of the empire of India / by Sir Wm. Turner. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    XXVIII. — Contributions to the Craniology of the People of the Empire of India. Part I. The Hill Tribes of the North-East Frontier and the People of Burma. By Professor Sir Wm. Turner, M.B., D.C.L., F.P.S. (With Three Plates.) (Read July 3, 1899.) For a number of j^ears I have been collecting specimens and conducting an investiga- tion into the craniological characters of the native inhabitants of our great Indian Empire, and several hundred skulls have now been under examination, and almost all have been measured. The sources to which I have been indebted for material are in part the collection of crania belonging to the Henderson Trustees, long known as the Edinburgh Phrenological Museum, and now deposited by the Trustees in the Anatomical Museum of the University ; in part, a few specimens belonging to the University collected by my predecessors in office ; in part, the valuable series of Indian crania belonging to the Indian Museum, Calcutta, which through the intercession of Dr John Anderson, F.RS., the former Director, the Trustees of that Museum, with great liberality, most courteously permitted me to have the loan of for purposes of study ; and lastly, a number of crania which have been forwarded to me by friends and former pupils, engaged in the public service in India, to whom I take this opportunity of expressing my indebtedness for the valuable material which I have received from them. Owing to the number of specimens and the wide range of country from which they have been derived, I have thought it advisable to depart from my original intention of including in one memoir my observations on the whole series of crania, and in preference, to arrange and publish them in groups, based on the geographical distribution of the people. The skulls described in this, the first part of my memoir, are sixty-four in number, and include specimens from the hill tribes of the North-east frontier of India and from Burma. For purposes of comparison I have also given tables of measurements of skulls from China and Siam. Hill Tribes. Before I commence the description of the skulls of the Hillmen, it may be well to preface the anatomical details with some reference to the localities from which the crania were obtained, as well as the names which have been given to the places and to the people who dwell in them. In entering on the consideration of the savage and barbarous tribes who inhabit the wide range of mountainous country which lies south and east of the river Brahma- putra and Assam on the one hand, and north and west of Burma on the other, we are eonfronted by differences in the nomenclature employed by those who have explored VOL. XXXIX. PART III. (NO. 28) 5 R