While of secondary importance, the fibula often presents interesting
features which make it worthy of closer attention than it usually
receives. One of these features concerns its length on the two sides of
the body, which, in some Indians at least, is more uniform than that
of its companion bone, the tibia. It was found so by the writer in
the skeletal collections from Arkansas and Louisiana mounds, and the
feature appears again in the Munsee. The slight differences presented
by the Munsee fibulæ in this particular harmonize with those of the
tibiæ.
The percental relation of the female to the male fibula averages 93.5
(the male bone = 100), while in the tibia it was only as 91.7 to
100.[68] This anomaly is due to the unexplained relative shortness of
the female Munsee tibiæ.
[68] Taking only cases where all four bones of one body are available
for measurement, we obtain 92 for the relation of female to male tibiæ
and 94.6 for that of the fibulæ, numbers which stand to each other very
much as do those above given.
As to the shape of the shaft, which in the fibula differs more than
in any other bone, the prevalent tendency, as in the Arkansas and
Louisiana specimens, is toward type 2, or the lateral prismatic; a good
many of the bones, however, show also a more or less marked fluting
of one or two of the surfaces. The details are given in the following
table: