Nor can the truth of Professor Busk’s conclusion, that the group of skulls in question belong to a people akin in blood to the modern Basques, be disputed. We are indebted to M. Broca[133] for the elaborate description of seventy-eight Basque crania from a village cemetery in Guipuscoa, and of fifty-eight from an ossuary at St. Jean de Luz, in which they had been collected in the reign of Francis I., 1532. In both these groups the long and oval types predominated, the broad type being represented by 6·4 (Thurnam) per cent. in the one, and 37·36 per cent. (Broca) in the other; a difference that is doubtless caused by the greater mixture of blood in the south-west of France than in the north-west of Spain, shut off from the broad-headed Gallic tribes by the Pyrenees.[134] Six skulls, obtained by Professor Virchow from Bilbao, agree in all particulars with those from Guipuscoa. M. Broca has further shown, that this group of Spanish skulls offers all the characters of the black-haired, swarthy, oval-faced, Basque population of the surrounding region, and it therefore follows, that they may be taken as standards of comparison, as typical of the ancient Basque crania, modified, it may be, to some extent, by the infusion of other blood. Their agreement, therefore, with the skulls from Gibraltar implies that the latter are also Basque. And since they agree also with those from the cave of Perthi-Chwareu, as may be seen in the preceding Table, the men who buried their dead in the caves of North Wales in the neolithic age, are proved to belong to the same stock. The same long-headed, small race also inhabited France, side by side with the broad-headed Gallic tribes; and since to it belong the skeletons in the Cave de l’Homme Mort, which M. Broca refers to the neolithic aborigines, it may reasonably be concluded that in Gaul, as in Britain, it was the older of the two races. The two have also been met with in the caves of Belgium. If we allow that an aboriginal Basque population spread over the whole of Britain, France, and Belgium, and that it was subsequently dispossessed by broad-headed invaders, the two extremes of skull-form and of stature, and of the gradations between them, may be satisfactorily explained. And this view coincides with the well-ascertained facts of history. Dr. Thurnam was the first to recognize that the long skulls, out of the long barrows of Britain and Ireland, were of the Basque or Iberian type, and Professor Huxley holds that the river-bed skulls belong to the same race.[135] (Compare Table p. 197 with the preceding.) We have therefore proof, that an Iberian or Basque population spread over the whole of Britain and Ireland in the neolithic age, inhabiting caves, and burying their dead in caves and chambered tombs, just as in the Iberian Peninsula also in the neolithic age. _Dolicho-cephali and Brachy-cephali in Neolithic Caves of Belgium.--Chauvaux._