from them. In nine cases, however, they were subjected to a careful examination by Professor Bryce, with interesting results. The skull of a very young infant was taken out of the ditch of the early fort. A child's skull was discovered at the mouth of the large drain on the west side, where it enters the large ditch. From the ditch of the early fort came the jaw of a young person whose wisdom teeth had not yet erupted. Four skulls belonged to adult males, and one probably to a female. One of the male skulls was of a coarse and rugged type—the face bones heavy, the cheek bones prominent—the whole appearance indicating that the individual was not of Mediterranean race, but rather a native of Northern Europe. What perhaps makes the find more suggestive is that the frontal bone shows on the right side a clean incised fracture, three inches long, which has in all probability been caused by a wound during life. Indeed, it has all the appearance of being a death-blow from some sharp and heavy weapon. In falling, the implement had evidently turned as it cleft the skull, because, while one margin of the cut in the bone is clear and sharp, the other is irregular, and the outer table of the bone is chipped away. Further, the line along which the surface of the bone is shaved away is broader in the middle and runs out at either end of the wound, suggesting that the instrument had a convex edge like an axe. But the most curious of all these human relics was the nearly complete skeleton of a dwarf, found in one of the pits. Professor Bryce estimates the age at from twenty-two to twenty-three years, and yet the height cannot have exceeded four feet six inches. Though the creature must have been a dwarf, the bones show no signs of rickets or other bone disease, being well formed but slight and slender to a remarkable degree. How it came to lie in the pit beneath the bones of nine horses is a problem of which no solution can be hoped for.
The Pits of two Periods
Interesting questions arise in connection with the dating of the pits. They group themselves into two clearly different periods. But there are very few of them which it is possible to assign quite definitely to one or other of the various occupations of the fort. The coins found among their contents were few in number, a 'first brass of Hadrian' and a 'second brass' of Vespasian or Titus in Pit I (the well of the Principia), an imperfect coin of a Flavian Emperor in Pit LVIII, denarii of Galba and of the Gens Cordia in Pit LXV, a 'second brass' of Domitian in Pit LXXIX, and a 'first brass' of Trajan
111