Thinking About Craniometry- The Racial Turn
Samuel Morton’s researches were in fact the mature expression of a racial turn that began no within a decade after Camper’s death in 1789. It owed much to the adoption of his ‘facial angle’ by early practitioners of the unorthodox cerebral science of phrenology. Devotees of phrenology’s curious blending of anatomy and social psychology seized on Camper’s facial angle as empirically reinforcing the truth of their core teaching: that the brain was made up of discrete ‘organs’, each the seat of a specific faculty of cognition, affect, emotion or intellect, and that the relative strengths and weaknesses of each faculty in the make-up of the mind could be judged by the relative impression that each ‘organ’ made on the overlying surface of the cranium. The creator of the science, the Austrian anatomist Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828), and also Johann Gaspar Spurzheim (1776-1832), his student, collaborator and later rival, eagerly pointed out that they had consistently found the skulls of African peoples that came into their possession to have typically smaller facial angles and thus, as they believed, less space within the cranium for those ’organs’ which were supposedly the seat of ‘higher’ powers of intellect, reasoning and moral judgement. (Turnbull 2006) As Gall publicly declared in 1798, clearly alluding to Blumenbach and Camper, ‘I may get on the bad side of [these] highly esteemed men’, but maybe you will come to understand [via phrenology] why some of our brothers cannot count over three; why others do not have a notion of private property; why eternal peace among mankind remains an eternal fantasy; etc. (Gall 1994, 26) For his part, Spurzheim, whose arrival in Britain in 1816 was largely responsible for stimulating British interest in phrenology, placed even greater weight on correlating racial ancestry, qualities of mind and cranial morphology. Breaking with his mentor Gall in 1813, he developed his own map of brain and mind, making extensive use of institutional and private collections of ‘national crania’ to match supposed typicalities of head shape with what voyagers, explorers and colonial officials described as racially typical behavioural traits. (Spurzheim 1818)
When Morton’s Crania Americana was published in 1839, it came prefaced with an essay by George Combe (1788-1858), then Britain’s leading promoter of phrenology.(Gibbon 1878; Cooter 1984) However, phrenology was only one source of craniometry’s infusion with racialism. As influential, if not more so, was the correlation of intelligence and cranial volume by Georges Cuvier, (1769–1832), the most influential French comparative anatomist of the early nineteenth century. Cuvier was among phrenology’s influential critics. He dismissed Gall’s claim to have pin-pointed specific mental attributes to faculties arising from discrete ‘organs’ within the brain as pseudo-science without foundation and likely to socially dangerous consequences in des-stabilising true science. (Outram 1984, 130-33) However, as Bronwen Douglas has observed, Cuvier’s views on varietal ancestry and intelligence underwent a significant shift during the 1790s. While at the start of the decade he dismissed the notion that intellectual dissimilarities could be explained by differences in the brain and nervous system, he had come, by the late 1790s, to conclude that human consciousness arose from physiological processes in the brain; and given that the human brain was ‘moulded in the cavity of the cranium, which it fills exactly’, it seemed to him that the internal volume of the skull was in fact an indicator of intellectual powers (Douglas 2008, 33-34) Moreover by ascertaining the relative proportion of the cranium and the face it was possible to gauge the degree of perfection in the ‘internal faculties’ (Cuvier 1802, 4)
For Cuvier, variation had operated as a ‘cruel law…which seemed to have doomed to eternal inferiority all the tribes of our species which are unfortunate enough to have a depressed and compressed cranium’. (Cuvier 1817, 273) This was especially true, Cuvier believed, of African peoples, for whom, it seemed to him, the price of successful environmental adaptation had supposedly been shrinkage over time of their intellectual powers to substantially below those of peoples indigenous to other continents. Reading Cuvier today, incidentally, one cannot help but be struck and puzzled as to why his humanist dismissal of innate African inferiority gave way to his endorsing, on supposedly scientific grounds, the wealth of pernicious racialised testimony justifying the exploitation and enslavement of African peoples that had accumulated since the beginnings of the Atlantic slave trade. So much so that he could confidently assert that in African societies ‘intelligence has nowhere risen to the point of reaching a regular form of government or the least appearance of sustained knowledge, has nowhere preserved either annals or traditions.’ (Cuvier and Rudwick 1997, 246)
Generally speaking, by the mid-nineteenth century, investigators of skull morphology fell into two camps. There were those who shared Samuel Morton’s conviction that mental attributes and qualities could be gauged from geometric measurements of heads and skulls - although by no means all subscribed to phrenology’s mapping of mental faculties to specific regions of the cerebellum. One significance weakness of phrenology in the eyes of most anatomists, as Anne Harrington has shown, was that the brain comprised two structurally identical cerebral hemispheres, separated by a longitudinal fissure, whereas phrenologists held that the material sub-stratum of various mental faculties was located in only one hemisphere, and not its twin. (Harrington 1987, 23, 46) But regardless of what they made of phrenology, those who saw craniometry as a means of measuring the relative weight of intelligence and emotion in psychological makeup were generally sceptical as to whether, as Blumenbach and Camper believed, humanity had branched from one ancestral pair into varietal types as a result of colonising different continents. It seemed to them that craniometry proved the characteristic form of the skull in each varietal type to be so distinctive and historically stable as to suggest that humanity was more likely a genus of a separately originating species, each possessing more or less unique innately fixed qualities of body and mind. (Turnbull 2017, 123-50)
As for authorities who continued in the tradition of Buffon, Blumenbach and Camper to believe in the essential unity of humanity, many favoured Blumenbach’s mode of viewing crania from above - the norma verticulis - along with other non-metric observations of the front, sides and base of the cranium. This did not mean, however, that they reaffirmed his commitment to the psychic equality of humankind. James Cowles Prichard (1786-1848), for example, was among the most influential ethnologists of the first half of the nineteenth century. An Evangelical humanitarian, he firmly believed in humanity’s monogenetic origin and possession of identical mental capabilities. He did not accept, as Georges Cuvier maintained, that European missionary tutelage would produce little or no improvement in the intelligence of Africans, Australians or other peoples whose destiny, as both he and Cuvier believed, had been to suffer environmentally induced degeneration into states of ‘barbarism’ or ‘savagery’. Even so, Prichard’s examinations of skulls were among the reasons he concurred with Cuvier that there was ‘nothing more probable’ that ‘the average parts of perfection in the development of the brain…[differed] in different nations with the diversities of climate and other elements of the external condition, and with the degrees of social culture. (Prichard 1836, 216)
