Hence it appears that a short race with a very strange and low-browed type of skull preceded the men of the Reindeer Age. When, thirty years ago, only the original skull-top from the Neander cave (Fig. 76) was known, Virchow, of Berlin, considered it to be probably that of an idiot, whilst Huxley expressed the opinion that it indicates a race of men with decidedly low development, and in some respects more ape-like characters than modern Europeans; but he held that it is not to be considered as “a missing link,” nor as taking us appreciably nearer from modern man to the apes, since it is most closely approached by the flat skulls, already well known, of some of the South Australian natives, both in shape and in the cubical capacity of the brain-cavity. What I mean by the flatness of the skull may be understood by looking at a side view of a monkey’s skull (Fig. 81) and of an ordinary European human skull (take the Cromagnon skull as equivalent, Fig. 75) placed upright, so that the eyes are looking forward. If in an outline or photograph of each of these skulls you draw a straight line from a point between the eyebrows back to a point just below the most projecting ridge of the hindermost region of the skull, you will find that above that line in the monkey’s skull is a slightly curved surface—the roof of the brain-case. But in the human skull above the similarly drawn line the roof bulges so as to form an almost hemispherical dome, rising sometimes vertically in the front region to form “the straight, high forehead” (which Shakespeare commended, even in woman). It swells out in the hinder region also. Now the Neander skulls, and to a less extent the skulls of many of the Australian aborigines, are more like the monkey’s in this matter; the dome of the roof is shallow and flat, and the forehead does not rise up, but slopes backwards, so that the whole contents of the brain-case are lessened by the reduction of the frontal and upper region. And there is reason to consider this frontal region of the brain as specially connected with some of the higher intellectual qualities of the mind.