An Autobiographical Sketch of James Croll, with Memoir of his Life and Work, was prepared by J. C. Irons, and published in 1896.
CROLY, GEORGE (1780-1860), British divine and author, son of a Dublin physician, was born on the 17th of August 1780. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and after ordination was appointed to a small curacy in the north of Ireland. About 1810 he came to London, and occupied himself with literary work. A man of restless energy, he claims attention by his extraordinary versatility. He wrote dramatic criticisms for a short-lived periodical called the New Times; he was one of the earliest contributors to Blackwood’s Magazine; and to the Literary Gazette he contributed poems, reviews and essays on all kinds of subjects. In 1819 he married Margaret Helen Begbie. Efforts to secure an English living for Croly were frustrated, according to the Gentleman’s Magazine (Jan. 1861), because Lord Eldon confounded him with a Roman Catholic of the same name. Excluding his contributions to the daily and weekly press his chief works were:—Paris in 1815 (1817), a poem in imitation of Childe Harold; Catiline (1822), a tragedy lacking in dramatic force; Salathiel: A Story of the Past, the Present and the Future (1829), a successful romance of the “Wandering Jew” type; The Life and Times of his late Majesty George the Fourth (1830); Marston; or, The Soldier and Statesman (1846), a novel of modern life; The Modern Orlando (1846), a satire which owes something to Don Juan; and some biographies, sermons and theological works.
Croly was an effective preacher, and continued to hope for preferment from the Tory leaders, to whom he had rendered considerable services by his pen; but he eventually received, in 1835, the living of St Stephen’s, Walbrook, London, from a Whig patron, Lord Brougham, with whose family he was connected. In 1847 he was made afternoon lecturer at the Foundling hospital, but this appointment proved unfortunate. He died suddenly on the 24th of November 1860, in London.
His Poetical Works (2 vols.) were collected in 1830. For a list of his works see Allibone’s Critical Dictionary of English Literature (1859).
CROMAGNON RACE, the name given by Paul Broca to a type of mankind supposed to be represented by remains found by Lartet, Christy and others, in France in the Cromagnon cave at Les Eyzies, Tayac district, Dordogne. At the foot of a steep rock near the village this small cave, nearly filled with debris, was found by workmen in 1868. Towards the top of the loose strata three human skeletons were unearthed. They were those of an old man, a young man and a woman, the latter’s skull bearing the mark of a severe wound. The skulls presented such special characteristics that Broca took them as types of a race. Palaeolithic man is exclusively long-headed, and the dolichocephalic appearance of the crania (they had a mean cephalic index of 73.34) supported the view that the “find” at Les Eyzies was palaeolithic. It is, however, inaccurate to state that brachycephaly appears at once with the neolithic age, dolichocephaly even of a pronounced type persisting far into neolithic times. The Cromagnon race may thus be, as many anthropologists believe it, early neolithic, a type of man who spread over and inhabited a large portion of Europe at the close of the Pleistocene period. Some have sought to find in it the substratum of the present populations of western Europe. Quatrefages identifies Cromagnon man with the tall, long-headed, fair Kabyles (Berbers) who still survive in various parts of Mauritania. He suggests the introduction of the Cromagnon from Siberia, “arriving in Europe simultaneously with the great mammals (which were driven by the cold from Siberia), and no doubt following their route.”
See A. H. Keane’s Ethnology (1896); Mortillet, Le Préhistorique (1900); Sergi, The Mediterranean Race (1901); Lord Avebury, Prehistoric Times, p. 317 of 1900 edition.