Yet another point deserves mention. It was evidently considered undesirable that the crania from which pieces had been taken should be left in a mutilated condition, and therefore pieces front other crania were taken to fill up the gap, so that, says Broca,34 a new life was evidently supposed to await the dead, for otherwise what object can the restitution have served? Dr. Prunières is also of opinion35 that the introduction into the crania of certain deceased persons of round pieces from other skulls implies the belief in another life. This explanation, hypothetical as it is, is really very plausible, and it is a pleasant thought that our remote ancestors had faith in a future life; which faith is alike the greatest honor and the greatest comfort of humanity. Is not yet another more striking proof of the belief in a second existence to be found in the number of objects placed in tombs at all periods of time and in every part of the world? It is this belief, raising man as it does above the material needs of his daily life, which forms the true grandeur of the human race, and if a nation once loses it it is sure to relapse into barbarism. When trepanning was the fashion there is no doubt that the operation was performed in many different ways. Posthumous trepanations were accomplished with the aid of a flint implement used as a chisel or a saw. There was greater difficulty about an operation on a living subject. Broca is of opinion that it was done with a drill turned round and round in the skull in the way the French shepherds still treat diseases of the crania in their sheep. The elliptical form of the wound seemed to him to prove this, and he was further of opinion that when an opening had been drilled in the skull at the point chosen, the trepanation was completed by scraping the bone with a small flint blade.36 Discoveries made since the death of the great French anthropologist, however, compel us to modify this opinion. The inflammation of the bone noticed along the edges of the trepanation proves that a notched implement was used to saw out the piece of skull.37 However the operation may have been performed, it is not one of great danger to the patient or of great difficulty to the operator. Experiments on animals with Quaternary flint implements have always been successful, and have had no tragic results, which is the best proof we can possibly give. The size of the perforations made varies ad infinitum. One, the largest known, is described which is no less than sixteen inches in diameter.38 Examples are known of the trepanation of every part of the skull, even of the forehead, which at one time was supposed to have escaped. We have ourselves given instances of frontal trepanation, and Dr. Prunières mentions eleven cases in which the forehead had been operated on.