parish, brought their infants to be baptized. One of these women being asked in due form, the name of the child, replied, One-too-many, which according to her feelings of family increase was an expression of the fact. The clergyman without apprehending the sense of the name, christened the infant somewhat according to the sound, and it was not until the name came to be entered in the vestry minutes, that he discovered the whim of the mother.

The custom in some country parishes of calling a child by the name of the saint on whose day he happens to be born, is one that, if more generally adopted, would be a self-sufficient explanation of a Christian name; and if the Romish calendar were used, might afford a copious vocabulary. We should then find such old world names as Alban, Alcuin, Aldhelm, Eloy, Ethelburga, Gwendoline, Werburga, etc. A reverend contributor to Notes and Queries (1853), baptized a child, Benjamin Simon Jude. On inquiring the reason of so odd a conjunction of names, he was told that the infant was born on the festival of St. Simon and St. Jude, and that it was always unlucky to take the day from the child. The practice of giving foundlings the name of the parish where they are baptized has afforded to many of these waifs a cognomen of more prestige than properly belonged to them, while it has helped unduly to multiply the surnames of particular families. In the register of St. Lawrence, Jewry, the surname of Lawrence is, or was formerly, invariably given to the strays found within that parish; and in the Temple register it appears that from 1728 to 1755, no fewer than 104 foundlings were christened there, all of whom were surnamed Temple or Templar. Had all parish officers been of the inventive genius of Mr. Bumble, this somewhat objectionable practice would not have been persisted in. That superior person tells Mrs. Mann, who conducts a farm for the raising of pauper children, that he "inwented" the idea of naming the foundlings of the workhouse in alphabetical order. On some occasions foundlings have been named after the thoroughfare in which they were exposed. An instance of this occurred at Bristol, where a female infant was christened Anne Wine Street, she having been found in the street of that name.

The Human Remains

from the Stoney Littleton Barrow.

BY JOHN BEDDOE, M.D., F.R.S.

(Read November 11th, 1886.)

THE ancient tomb at Stoney Littleton belongs to that variety of the long barrow which is called a chambered barrow or galleried tumulus. It is not, I think, however, quite clear that these chambered barrows differ as to the period of their erection from other long barrows; certainly no difference between their respective tenants has yet been made out.

This one is of considerable interest and is fortunately in a very fair state of preservation. It is the subject of a paper by Sir Richard Colt Hoare, in the 19th volume of the Archæologia, which is illustrated by several careful drawings, including a ground plan drawn to scale. This plan and one of the drawings correctly indicate the entrance as being at the south-eastern end of the barrow, though in the text Sir Richard speaks of it as "facing the north-west."1

Our business, however, lies with the osseous contents, whereof the, alas! very scanty relics are in our local museum. They

The mistake made by Sir R. C. Hoare in his original account of the barrow, published nearly seventy years since, as to the position of the entrance, was noticed by Sir John Maclean in a paper on Chambered Tumuli, in the Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucester Archæological Society for 1881 (vol. v. p. 109), but had been copied by most previous writers on the subject, some of whom had even added to the confusion. Thus both the late Thos. Wright, F.S.A., in The Celt, the Roman, and the Saxon, and the late Llewellynn Jewitt, F.S.A., in Grave Mounds and their Contents, state that the entrance was on the north-west side. Mr. Kains-Jackson in Our Ancient Monuments and the Land around them (1880), misquotes Sir Richard, as follows :-" The entrance of the tumulus faces the south west.' In the Proceedings of the Somersetshire Archæological and Natural History Society for 1858, there is a ground plan on Plate 3, which shows the entrance on the south-west, while on Plate 4 is an elevation of "the south entrance."-ED,

have been described in the Crania Britannica of Davis and Thurnam, in connexion with Thurnam's account of another famous long barrow, that at Uley, near Dursley, but may nevertheless furnish occasion for some further remarks.

Thurnam, following hints thrown out by Daniel Wilson and Bateman, worked out with much ability the theory now generally accepted, which connects the long barrows of Britain with a longheaded race of comparatively small stature, believed to be of Iberian kinship. The skulls found in such barrows, though narrow, are as a rule of good form and capacity, certainly not smaller, perhaps even slightly larger, than the average of roundbarrow folk, or of modern Europeans. It must be remembered, however, that these huge tumuli are almost certainly the graves of chiefs and of their families and dependents, not of the mass of the people, and that chiefs among barbarians owe their position to the superior endowments of themselves or of their ancestors, such superiority implying, on the average, greater volume of brain. The commonalty were probably buried, if buried at all, with very little care, and their remains have mostly perished, just as those of the round-headed serfs of the long-headed graverow men must have perished out of Swabia. Dr. Henry Bird, indeed, thinks he can recognize, in the small ill-developed skulls occasionally found in small "tump" barrows on the Cotswold, remains of an earlier population than that of the chambered tumuli. It is, I think, possible that they were coeval with or even later than the long barrows, and contain the only relics of the servile population that have come down to us.

There is little doubt that rites analogous to the Hindu Sutti were practised at the obsequies of chiefs in the neolithic period.2 The dependents who were put to death on these occasions must, sometimes at least, have been inferior in cranial type to their lords. In an undisturbed barrow it may often be possible to distinguish by position the principal interment from the rest, the chief from the dependent; but the Stoney Littleton barrow had been well rummaged and ransacked before Sir R. C. Hoare's day, and the position of the several bones he found in it may have been shuffled to any extent. This, however, may be affirmed, that the fragments we have to do with were not found in the principal chamber, and there is, therefore, some slight presump

2 See Thurnam's account of the Rodmarton barrow, in Crania Britannica.

tion against their having belonged to the principal interment. When the barrow was explored in 1816, by Sir R. C. Hoare and the Rev. John Skinner, it would seem that these fragments were not quite the only remains of the two skulls to which they belonged. At least Mr. Skinner expressed his regret that he could preserve no more, seeming to imply that there were other and smaller fragments which might have been preserved and put together, had he only known how to do so. We must, however, be grateful to him for what he did, rather than censorious as to what he left undone, for osseous remains had not then the interest which they have for modern archæologists. His words are, "Two of the skulls appear to have been almost flat, there being little or no forehead rising above the sockets of the eyes, the shape much resembling those given in the works of Lavater, as characteristic of the Tartar tribes. I wish I could have preserved one entire; but I have retained the upper part of two distinct crania, which will be sufficient to confirm this remarkable fact." Sir R. C. Hoare speaks of "the two skulls discovered in this tumulus, which appear to be totally different in their formation from any others which our researches have led us to examine, being fronte valde depressâ."

Thurnam traced the fragments to our Bristol museum, and with the assistance of our fellow-citizen, Augustine Prichard, made a careful examination of them. His account is as follows:

"The general resemblance of these portions of skulls to the Uley cranium is sufficiently apparent. The frontal bone is from the skull of a man, of not more than middle age. The frontal sinuses and temporal ridges are unusually marked and prominent. Its narrow and contracted character is very obvious, and its peculiarly receding and flat form fully justifies the observations of Mr. Skinner and Sir Richard Hoare. In the great extent to which it is present, this last is probably an exceptional and individual peculiarity. As in the Uley skull, a central ridge is to be traced along the median line. The length of this frontal bone is 48 inches, its breadth 4.2 inches; in the thickest parts it measures the third of an inch. The length of this skull must have fallen short of that of the skull from Uley, the length of the frontal bone being one inch less; the elongation of this bone in the Uley skull being most unusual. The defective calvarium consists of the frontal bone, the greater part of the right, and a

smaller portion of the left parietal bone. It has probably formed part of the skull of a female, of rather advanced age. The frontal sinuses, temporal ridges, and other features are much less defined and prominent. The forehead is narrow and receding, but less so than the former. The tendency in the form of this skull has clearly been to narrowness and elongation. The length of the frontal bone is 4.9 inches, the breadth 4.5 inches; the greatest thickness is a quarter of an inch."

Dr. Thurnam does not mention the lower jaw which accompanies the other relics of Stoney Littleton in the Bristol Museum. This may or may not have belonged to the owner of either of the skulls of which we have portions; if to either, it was probably to the woman, though the teeth are too little eroded for a person at all advanced in life. The mandible is imperfect, but there is enough of it to show that the chin was narrow and angular, and the alveolar arch oval rather than round.

There can be little doubt that Dr. Thurnam was right in attributing one of the skull-fragments to a man, and the other and larger one to a woman. His measurements and mine, which follow, are pretty nearly in accord: they are all in inches.

I have here compared these fragments with the skulls of people most likely to be akin to their ancient owners. The Gloucester skulls mentioned are those of Mr. John Bellows's find, and are of the Roman period; the Micheldean ones are mediæval, from the ossuary there. It will be observed that the measurements of our fragments are small, except the length of the frontal, which is about equal to the average of European races. The skulls were therefore probably of fair length, but narrow and decidedly low, especially the male one, containing, we may be certain, but small brains. In this most important respect they differ from the ordinary long-barrow type; and in the lowness of the forehead, coupled, in the case of the male, where it is most marked, with great prominence of the brows and frontal sinuses, they approach