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

  • Turner, Wm. (William), Sir, 1832-1916.
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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    Census of Assam, 1891. As many as 102,857 Ndgas belonging to different tribes were living in that year in the province of Assam. The skulls from the Naga Hills, which Surgeon-Lieut.-Col. Wright has presented me with, belonged to the Tonkal tribe, about seventy miles north-east of Manipur. General Johnstone speaks of visits which he paid to the Tankhool village of Chingsow, to the north-east of Manipur, which is probably of the same tribe as that named Tonkal by Colonel Wright. Both of these authorities speak of Ndga villages in this district as having been raided by Kukis. Sir James Johnstone describes the people as having a fine physique, equal to that of the An garni ; but they went mostly naked. Lushai Hillmen. Table L* In 1890, my former assistant and pupil, now Surgeon-Captain D. Macbeth Moir, who was engaged in a military expedition against the Lushais, forwarded to me a skull (H in Table) which was dug up in the process of constructing Fort Tregear, built in the loop made by the Koladyne river in the South Lushai hill-tracts, a few miles to the north of the Blue Mountain. The country visited b}^ the expedition lies between 92° and 94° longitude and 22° and 24° latitude, and consists of a succession of steep hills and deep narrow ravines. Some of the hills attain a height of 9000 feet, and many of the villages are from 4000 to 5000 feet above the sea-level. In the following year Dr Moir sent me a skull (I in Table) which had been found in the bed of the Koladyne river, immediately to the north of Fort Tregear. He believed it to be the skull of a Lushai who, when returning to a village on the Don Mountain, from a village on the Aitur Mountain, was drowned in crossing the river. The two skulls were found within fifteen miles from each other. Dr Moir states that the Lushais place the severed heads of their enemies on posts, but do not impale the skull. In 1891 I received from a former pupil, Surgeon-Captain H. B. Melville, at that time civil surgeon stationed at Fort Aijal in the North Lushai Hills, the skull of a Lushai warrior who had sustained a sword-cut in the left temporal region during a skirmish. The edges of the cut were sharp and somewhat splintered, and the injury had doubtless been the cause of death (G in Table). Through the kindness of my friend Professor Cunningham of Trinity College, Dublin, I have had the opportunity of examining two Lushai skulls in his museum. One was procured in ] 892 by Dr Malcolm Moore. It was dug up in the floor of a hut in Poi Boi, a village of the North Lushai people, situated a little to the north-east of Fort Aijal. The dead are said to be buried in the huts of their relatives. The other specimen was obtained in the village of Kamree in the South Lushai Hills, by Assistant- * In tins and the succeeding Tables the letters E. U. A. M. mean Edinburgh University Anatomical Museum ; H. T. the Museum of the Henderson Trust; T. C. D. the Museum of Trinity College, Dublin. The cubic capacity has been taken by the method which I described in my Challenger Report on Human Crania, part xxix., 1884, to which I may also refer for an explanation of the greater number of the measurements employed in the Tables. The terms chamaeprosopic (low faced) and leptoprosopic (high faced) are adopted from Professor Kollmann’s memoirs.