Chapter I.
THE PIONEERS OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Definition of the word “Anthropology.”
Aristotle, “the father of them that know,” as Dante called him, is credited with having coined the word “anthropologist”; but he did not employ it in a very complimentary sense. Describing a lofty-minded man in his Ethics, he terms him ουκ ανθρωπολογος—not a gossip, not a talker about himself. But the word does not seem to have supplied a permanent want in the Greek world, and we meet it next in a Latin form in the sixteenth century. Anthropologium was then used in a restricted sense, relating to man’s bodily structure; and the first work in which it occurs is generally stated to be Magnus Hundt’s Anthropologium de hominis dignitate, which appeared in 1501, and dealt in a general way with human anatomy and physiology.
The first appearance of the word in English was probably in the seventeenth century, when an anonymous book was published bearing the title Anthropologie Abstracted; or, The idea of Humane nature reflected in briefe Philosophicall and anatomical collections (1655). The author defines his subject thus:—
Anthropologie, or the history of human nature, is, in the vulgar (yet just) impression, distinguished into two volumes: the first entitled Psychologie, the nature of the rational soule discoursed; the other anatomie, or the fabrick or structure of the body of man revealed in dissection ... of the former we shall in a distracted rehersall, deliver our collections.[[2]]
[2]. See Bendyshe, p. 356.
The meaning of the word was scarcely clear in the beginning of the nineteenth century, when we find, in the British Encyclopædia of 1822, the following definitions, “A discourse upon human nature,” and “Among Divines, that manner of expression by which the inspired writers attribute human parts and passions to God.”
Concerning the present use of the term “Anthropology,” few will take exception to the definition given by Topinard in his l’Anthropologie (1876): “Anthropology is the branch of natural history which treats of man and the races of man.” It may be yet more succinctly described as “the science of man,” which comprises two main divisions—the one which deals with the natural man (ανθρωπος, or homo); the other which is concerned with man in relation to his fellows, or, in other words, with social man (εθνορ, or socius). At the end of the Introduction we give the classification which we propose to adopt. It should, however, be stated that, whereas in this country we employ the term “Anthropology” to cover the whole subject, it is common on the Continent to restrict the term to what we designate as “Physical Anthropology,” “Anthropography,” or “Somatology.”
Fundamental Conceptions.
The beginnings of anthropology may probably be traced to what Professor Giddings (1896) has termed the “consciousness of kind,” but what Dr. McDougall (1898) has more definitely recognised as showing the gregarious impulse. He says (pp. 299-300):—
The gregarious impulse of any animal receives satisfaction only through the presence of animals similar to itself, and the closer the similarity the greater is the satisfaction.... Just so, in any human being the instinct operates most powerfully in relation to, and receives the highest degree of satisfaction from the presence of, the human beings who most closely resemble that individual, those who behave in like manner and respond to the same situations with similar emotions.
Andree, Parallelen. N. r. Tafel. III.
Bushmen Raiding Kafir Cattle.
(After R. Andree.)
Race Portraiture of the Ancient Egyptians
on the tombs of the Kings at Biban-el-Molouk (XVIIIth-XXIst Dynasty).
Race Discrimination.
The recognition of degrees of likeness implies the recognition of unlikeness. This may be termed the stage of race discrimination. Ancient literature and the pictorial art of certain uncivilised peoples abound in examples of race discrimination. The crude representations of human beings discovered in caves in France and elsewhere were probably intended to portray the people themselves, who lived in the palæolithic period. These drawings or carvings, like those of most modern savages, exhibit much greater skill in delineating animals than human beings; consequently it is dangerous to rely on them as representing the physical characteristics of the then existing populations. Very different is the famous Bushman pictograph of a fight between Bushmen and Kafirs. Here relative size, the difference in colour, and the employment of different implements of war by these two races, are strikingly exemplified; but as a general rule the Bushmen themselves exaggerate certain features and minimise others—for example, the head is invariably too small and featureless.
In Egypt there is an immense amount of pictorial and sculptured material for ethnological study, covering a range of many centuries. Over three thousand years ago the artists—“untrained but not unobservant ethnologists”[[3]]—decorated the walls of royal tombs with representations of the four races of mankind, among whom the Egyptians of the nineteenth dynasty supposed the world to be partitioned—(1) The Egyptians, whom they painted red; (2) the Asiatics or Semites, yellow; (3) the Southerns or Negroes, black; and (4) the Westerns or Northerners, white, with blue eyes and fair beards. Each type is clearly differentiated by peculiar dress and characteristic features. In addition to these four types, other human varieties were delineated by the Ancient Egyptians, most of which can be identified. “On the Egyptian monuments we not only find very typical portraits, but also an attempt at classification; for the Egyptians were a scientific people, with a knowledge of medicine, and also skilled mathematicians; therefore their primitive anthropology is not unexpected.”[[4]] This facility for race discrimination was still earlier exhibited in the prehistoric or early historic slate palettes of Egypt.
[3]. D. Randall-Maciver and A. Wilkin, Libyan Notes, 1901, p. 1.
[4]. Man, viii., 1908, p. 129.
Belonging to the fifth century B.C. are the realistic portraiture figurines in pottery discovered by Professor Flinders Petrie at Memphis,[[5]] “which clearly are copied from various races which were welded together by the Persians, and who all met in the foreign settlement at Memphis.” Professor Petrie identifies Sumerians or Accadians, the old Turanian people who started civilisation in Babylonia. “Their heads are identified by closely similar portraits carved in stone about 3000 B.C., and found in Mesopotamia.” Persians, Scythians, Mongols, and even Indians, are also recognised by him; but some of the latter are dated by him at about 200 B.C.
[5]. Poole, l.c.
Assyrian monuments are less explicit in this respect.
The Assyrians themselves are shown to have been of a very pure type of Semites; but in the Babylonians there is a sign of Cushite blood.... There is one portrait of an Elamite (Cushite) king on a vase found at Susa; he is painted black, and thus belongs to the Cushite race. The Ethiopian type can be clearly seen in the reliefs depicting the Assyrian wars with the kings of Ethiopia; but it is hard to discriminate Arabs and Jews from Assyrians; in fact, it is only in the time of good art that distinctions are traceable.[[6]]
[6]. H. H. Risley, The Tribes and Castes of Bengal: Ethnographic Glossary, i., 1892, p. xxxviii.
Rock carvings in Persia, Scythian coins, and numerous other monuments and remains from other countries and belonging to diverse ages, illustrate that the head-form, features, character of the hair and mode of wearing it, ornaments, dress, and weapons, were all recognised as means of discriminating between different peoples from the earliest times.
Ancient literature, of which one example must suffice, tells the same tale:—
The sense of differences of colour, which, for all our talk of common humanity, still plays a great and, politically, often an inconvenient part in the history of the world, finds forcible expression in the Vedic descriptions of the people whom the Aryans found in possession of the plains of India. In a well-known passage the god Indra is praised for having protected the Aryan colour, and the word meaning colour (varna) is used down to the present day as the equivalent of caste, more especially with reference to the castes believed to be of Aryan descent.[[7]]
[7]. Report Brit. Assoc., 1881, p. 683.
The word “caste” is of Portuguese origin. In the 179th hymn of the first Mandala of the Rig-Veda, as Dr. Gerson da Cunha points out,[[8]] the word varna is used in the dual number, ubhau varnau, “two colours,” white of the Aryans and black of the Dasyus—that is, of the “Dravidian” aborigines, who are elsewhere called “black-skinned,” “unholy,” “excommunicated.” Other texts dwell on their low stature, coarse features, and their voracious appetite. The Rig-Veda employs the word anâsa—“noseless”—to characterise the Dasyus and Daityas, which designations mean “thieves” or “demons.” It is hardly an exaggeration to say that from these sources there might be compiled a fairly accurate anthropological definition of the jungle tribes of to-day.
[8]. “Presidential Address: The Nasal Index in Biological Anthropology,” Journ. Anth. Soc. of Bombay, 1892, p. 542.
Thus were the foundations of descriptive anthropology unconsciously laid.
In our own day racial characters are seized upon in the same manner, and racial antipathy adds fuel to its own fire in regarding traits which differ from those of the speaker or writer as being ugly, objectionable, or of low type. “The study of race,” said the late Sir William Flower (1831-1899), “is at a low ebb indeed when we hear the same contemptuous epithet of ‘nigger’ applied indiscriminately by the English abroad to the blacks of the West Coast of Africa, to Kafirs of Natal, the Lascars of Bombay, the Hindoos of Calcutta, the aborigines of Australia, and even the Maories of New Zealand.”[[9]] The Englishman who contemns as a “nigger” any dark-skinned native has not advanced in race discrimination beyond his remote kinsman who crossed into the valley of the Indus some four thousand years ago.
[9]. Report Brit. Assoc., 1881, p. 683.
Hippocrates.
Hippocrates (460-357 B.C.), “the Father of Physic,” was certainly a pioneer in physical anthropology. He says: “I will pass over the smaller differences among nations, but will now treat of such as are great either from nature or custom; and, first, concerning the macrocephali. There is no other race of men which have heads in the least resembling theirs.” He believed that this elongated conformation of the head was originally produced artificially; but subsequently it was inherited, or, as he puts it: “Thus, at first usage operated, so that this constitution was the result of force; but in the course of time it was formed naturally, so that usage had nothing to do with it”—a view adopted many centuries later by Buffon and others.
Aristotle.
Not only was Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) the first authority to make use of the word “anthropology,”[[10]] but he may also be described as an anthropologist. Material had been collected by travellers, such as Hanno, the Carthaginian, who encountered gorillas in Africa; by historians, such as Herodotus (who was also a traveller); and by doctors, such as Hippocrates. Aristotle was indebted to some extent to all of these; but his vast works in natural history were based mainly on what he considered of primary importance—facts of actual personal knowledge derived from personal observation. On this account alone his writings deserved the place which they held for many centuries.
[10]. Cf. p. 6.
Thus, undisturbed by the dogmas of religion or philosophy, he placed man naturally among the animals (being thus, as Topinard remarks, about twenty centuries ahead of humanity), but distinguished from them by certain features—by the relative size of the brain, by two-leggedness, by mental characters, etc. Some writers regard it as improbable that either Hippocrates or Aristotle had ever dissected the human body, but it is also possible to hold an opposite view. Even Galen (c. 130 A.D.), whose anatomy held the field for more than a thousand years, had to base his conclusions on the bodies of animals, notably on those of monkeys; and, although he did not conceal the fact, it was not until the time of Vesalius that the discrepancy between simian and human anatomy was discovered.
Vesalius.
Vesalius (1513-1564) is the next great name in the history of physical anthropology. He was Professor of Anatomy at Padua, Bologna, and Pisa, and physician to Charles V. and Philip II. His work marks a revolution in anatomical science; for not only did he overthrow the doctrines which had been accepted for fourteen centuries, demonstrating that to a great extent Galen had studied the anatomy of the ape rather than that of man, but, by his own deductions from direct observation and original research, he established a fresh and unassailable foundation for future investigation. His services to anatomy have been compared to those of Galileo and Copernicus in the field of astronomy. His fate was not unlike that of many other daring pioneers of the Middle Ages. He was accused of having dissected a man while yet alive, and was dragged by his enemies before the Inquisition and condemned to death. By the intercession of the king his sentence was commuted into a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre; but on his return journey he was shipwrecked and drowned off the island of Zante.
Cunningham, in his Presidential Address to the Royal Anthropological Institute, 1908, refers to the work of Vesalius, whom he describes as one of the most remarkable figures in the sixteenth century. He adds:—
It is interesting to note in passing that certain racial distinctions did not escape the eye of Vesalius. “It appears,” he remarks, “that most nations have something peculiar in the shape of the head. The crania of the Genoese, and, still more remarkable, those of the Greeks and Turks, are globular in form. This shape, which they esteem elegant and well adapted to their practice of enveloping the head in the folds of their turbans, is often produced by the midwives at the solicitation of the mother.” He further observes “that the Germans had generally a flattened occiput and broad head, because the children are always laid on their backs in the cradles; and that the Belgians have a more oblong form, because the children are allowed to sleep on their sides.”
We know that more or less continuous pressure is exerted on the pliable heads of infants to produce admired shapes, but the theory was carried rather too far when adduced, some centuries later, to account for the facial features of negroes. Lawrence, in his Lectures on Comparative Anatomy, attributed the flat noses and thick lips of the negro to the method of carrying babies in Africa. The negro mothers, while at work, carry their infants on their backs, and “in the violent motions required for their hard labour, as in beating or pounding millet, the face of the child is said to be constantly thumping against the back of the mother.” By this rude treatment the face of the negro child was supposed to be moulded into shape; but, as Cunningham points out, no attempt was made to explain how the process of bumping produced exactly opposite results in the case of the nose and lips—reducing the prominence of the former and increasing the projection of the latter.
Spigel.
“The invention of the ‘lineæ cephalometricæ’ of Spigel, who died in the early part of the seventeenth century, may perhaps be regarded as constituting the earliest scientific attempt at cranial measurement.” He drew four lines in certain directions, and a skull in which these lines were equal to each other he regarded as regularly proportioned. “Although these lines are evidently not sufficient for the comparative ethnography of the present day, yet it is interesting to observe that, in ascending the zoological scale, these lines approximate equality just in proportion as the head measured approaches the human form.”[[11]]
[11]. J. Aitken Meigs, North American Med.-Chir. Rev., 1861, p. 840.
Tyson.
Johann Sperling, author of a Physica anthropologia (1668), and Samuel Haworth, who wrote Anthropologia; or A philosophical discourse concerning man (1680), also belong to the seventeenth century. But more important is the work of Edward Tyson, a Cambridge man, who took his degree of Doctor of Medicine in 1678. He was a Fellow, and later Censor, of the College of Physicians, Fellow of the Royal Society, and writer of numerous papers on anatomy. His fame rests mainly on the work which laid the foundations of comparative morphology, Orang-Outang, sive Homo Sylvestris: or The Anatomy of a Pygmie compared with that of a Monkey, an Ape, and a Man (1699). This was the first attempt to deal with the anatomy of any of the anthropoid apes, and shows very conspicuous ability on the part of the author. He compared the structure of man with that of the monkeys, and came to the conclusion that the pygmy formed a kind of intermediate animal between the two. The pygmy was, as a matter of fact, a chimpanzee, and its skeleton, which was thus early recognised as the “missing link,” is still to be seen in the Natural History Museum (British Museum) at South Kensington. Tyson added to his work on the Anatomy of the Pygmie, A Philological Essay, Concerning the Pygmies, the Cynocephali, the Satyrs, and Sphinges of the Ancients. Wherein it will appear that they are all either Apes or Monkeys, and not Men as formerly pretended. The purpose of the Essay may be expressed in his own words:—
If therefore I can make out ... that there were such Animals as Pygmies; and that they were not a Race of Men, but Apes; and can discover the Authors, who have forged all, or most of the idle Stories concerning them; and shew how the Cheat in after Ages has been carried on, by embalming the Bodies of Apes, then exposing them for the Men of the Country, from whence they brought them: If I can do this, I shall think my time not wholly lost, nor the trouble altogether useless, that I have had in this Enquiry.
The Pygmies.
This was the first attempt to explain in a rational fashion the innumerable tales found in all parts of the world about the existence of pygmy races, ape-men or men-apes. Tyson’s hypothesis was that all these legends were based on imperfect observations of apes, and he was followed by Buffon and others. It may be well here briefly to note the researches which have led in late years to the opposite conclusion—i.e., that the tales relate to a dwarf race of men formerly very widely spread over the globe.
This theory is mainly associated with the name of de Quatrefages (1810-1892). In the Introduction to his book on the pygmies he says: “For a long time past the small black races have attracted my attention and my interest in a special manner.” His earliest investigations of the subject were published in 1862, and continued until 1887. Analysing the evidence, he shows that the two localities where the ancients appear to place their pygmies (the interior of Africa and the southern-most parts of Asia), together with the characters assigned to them, indicate an actual knowledge of the two groups of small people (Negrilloes and Negritoes), who are still to be found in those regions. Professor J. Kollmann, of Basel, in his Pygmäen in Europa (1894), argues for the existence of a European pygmy race in Neolithic times from some remains found at Schaffhausen, and the wide prevalence of short statures among many peoples in Europe, especially in the south. Mr. David MacRitchie attributes not only legends of pygmies, but fairy-tales in general, to this prehistoric dwarf race. President Windle sums up the question thus:—
It is possible with more or less accuracy and certainty to identify most of those races which, described by the older writers, had been rejected by their successors. Time has brought their revenge to Aristotle and Pliny by showing that they were right, where Tyson, and even Buffon, were wrong. (P. liii.)
In the time of Aristotle Man took his place naturally at the head of the other animals, being distinguished from the brutes by certain characters. But the influence of religion and of philosophy did not long permit of this association. Man came to be regarded as the chef d’œuvre of creation, a thing apart, a position aptly described in the words of Saint Paul (marginal version) “for a little while inferior to the angels.”
In the eighteenth century came a startling change. Man was wrenched from this detached and isolated attitude, and linked on once more to the beasts of the field. This was the work of Linnæus.
Linnæus.
The year 1707 is memorable in the history of Anthropology as the date of the birth of two of its greatest men, Linnæus[[12]] (1707-1778) and Buffon (1707-1788). Both devoted long lives to science, and both produced monumental works of permanent value; but it would be hard to find two contemporary figures engaged in the same pursuit whose lives presented a greater contrast.
[12]. By a patent of nobility conferred in 1757 Linnæus became Karl von Linné.
Linnæus was the son of a poor pastor, and his mother was the daughter of the former pastor of the same small Swedish parish. At the early age of four young Karl is said to have taken an interest in botany, and to have begun to ask questions that his father could not answer. Either to escape this interrogation, or for wiser motives, the father made it a rule never to answer the same question twice, and to this early discipline Linnæus used to trace his tenacious memory. The boy was intended for the ministry, and was early sent to school; but, as he devoted all his time to botany, his progress in theology was nil, and when, after two years, his father visited the school, and learnt of the disappointing result of all the pinching and saving which had gone to provide for the son’s education, he resolved to apprentice him to a tailor or shoemaker in hopes of obtaining a better return for his outlay. Fortunately a friend intervened, and gave the boy board and lodging, besides private tuition, while he finished his gymnasium course. His work as a student seems to have failed to satisfy his instructors, for when he proceeded to the University of Lund it was with the enigmatic testimonial to the effect that “some shrubs in a garden may disappoint the cares of the gardener, but if transplanted into different soil may prosper.”
When barely twenty-two he left Lund for Upsala, taking with him his entire fortune of £8, and, being inexperienced and unknown, soon found himself in desperate straits. He was rescued by the generosity of Dr. Celsius, a professor of theology, but student of botany, who, impressed with Karl’s collections and enthusiasm, offered him board and lodging, and obtained for him some private pupils. The hardships of his life were not yet over, but gradually his work obtained recognition, abroad sooner than at home, and he could have lived at his ease in England or the Netherlands; only (as he expressed it), “his Sara was in Sweden,” and he returned to his native land to scrape together sufficient means to marry her.
Buffon.
From the beginning Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, was marked out for a different life. His father was a Burgundian Councillor, and his mother, besides being an heiress, was a woman of unusual ability. He was originally destined for the law, but his tastes always inclined towards science, and he soon found occasion to follow them.
He made the acquaintance of a young Englishman of rank and of his tutor, who was a man of science, and with them he travelled on the continent. About the same time Linnæus was also travelling, but in a different fashion. He set out to make explorations in Lapland, then very little known, carrying his luggage on his back, and covered nearly 5,000 miles at a cost of about £25. During his travels he kept a diary[[13]] of his observations, which contains not only botanical but also ethnological information of great value.
[13]. See Globus, “Linné als Ethnologe,” xci., 1907.
While Linnæus was living from hand to mouth, depending for his food on chance generosity, and mending his boots with folded paper, Buffon was living the gay life of the young men of his age and rank, and we hear of him being forced to flee to Paris to escape the results of wounding an Englishman in a gaming quarrel. (Linnæus was also guilty of drawing his sword in anger, but the provocation was different. During his absence from Upsala a rival had, by private influence, contrived to get a prohibition put on all private lecturing in the University, and he returned to find all his means of livelihood suddenly cut off.)
Nevertheless Buffon’s life of pleasure did not occupy all his energies. He possessed, as Voltaire said, “l’âme d’un sage dans le corps d’un athlête,” and while in Paris he wrote and translated various scientific works, was elected a member of the Academy of Science, and in 1739 was appointed keeper of the Jardin du Roi and of the Royal Museum.
The permanent value to Anthropology of the work of these two men lies in the fact that they both “saw life steadily, and saw it whole.” But they produced results not only distinct, but, in some respects, antagonistic. Buffon, as Topinard says, did not classify, he described; and the value of his work has been very differently appraised. Cuvier had small opinion of it. Camper and Saint-Hilaire considered the author the greatest naturalist of modern times, the French Aristotle. Topinard (1885, p. 33) thus describes the opinion of the public: “Le public, lui, n’hésita pas; dans l’Histoire naturelle des animaux il sentit un souffle nouveau, vit un pressentiment de l’avenir. La libre pensée était dans l’air, 89 approchait; l’œuvre de Buffon, comme l’Encyclopédie, Voltaire, Rousseau et Bougainville, contribua à la Révolution française.”
The genius of Linnæus lay in classification. Order and method were with him a passion. In his Systema Naturæ he fixed the place of Man in Nature, arranging Homo sapiens as a distinct species in the order Primates,[[14]] together with the apes, the lemurs, and the bats. He went further and classified the varieties of man, distinguishing them by skin colour and other characters into four groups—a classification which holds an honourable place at the present day.
[14]. The tenth edition, 1758, is the first in which the order Primates occurs. Earlier editions have the order Anthropomorpha. See Bendyshe, p. 424.
All this was abominable in the eyes of Buffon. “Une vérité humiliante pour l’homme, c’est qu’il doit se ranger lui-même dans la classe des animaux”; and in another place he exclaims: “Les genres, les ordres, les classes, n’existent que dans notre imagination.... Ce ne sont que des idées de convention.... Il n’y a que des individus!” And again: “La nature ne connait pas nos definitions; elle n’a jamais rangé ses ouvrages par tas, ni les êtres par genres.”
Nevertheless both rendered incalculable service to the science. Linnæus “found biology a chaos and left it a cosmos.” “L’anthropologie,” says Flourens, “surgit d’une grande pensée de Buffon; jusqu-là l’homme n’avait été étudié que comme individu, Buffon est le premier qui l’ait envisagé comme espèce.”
But Buffon was no believer in the permanent stability of species. “Nature is far from subjecting herself to final causes in the formation of her creatures.” He went so far as to make a carefully veiled hint (the Sorbonne having eyes on him) of a possible common ancestor for horse and ass, and of ape and man. At least, he says, so one should infer from their general resemblance; but, since the Bible affirms the contrary, “of course the thing cannot be.”[[15]] In 1751 the old naturalist was constrained by the Sorbonne to recant his geological heresies in these words: “I declare that I had no intention to contradict the text of Scripture; that I believe most firmly all therein related about the Creation, both as to order of time and matter of fact.”
[15]. Quoted from Clodd’s Pioneers of Evolution, 1897, p. 101.
J. F. Blumenbach
Blumenbach.
It was fortunate for the nascent science that the next great name on its roll was that of a man of very wide reading, endowed with remarkable reasoning powers, and with an exceptional perspicuity for sifting out the true from the false.
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) was Professor in the Faculty of Medicine at Göttingen, and early turned his attention to the special study of man. He was the first to place anthropology on a rational basis, and in his De generis humani varietate nativa (1775-1795) laid the foundations of race classification based on measurement. He noted the variations in the shape of the skull and of the face, and may therefore be regarded as the founder of craniology (see below, p. [28]). Besides the services rendered by Blumenbach to the science of anthropology in classification and in laying the foundations of craniology, there was a third field in which his work was perhaps even more valuable to his contemporaries.
Monsters.
Every successive age is astonished at the credulity of its predecessor; but when we remember the grave difficulties which beset the explorer in the eighteenth century, and the wild “travellers’ tales” which it was impossible either to verify or to disprove, it is easy to sympathise with the credence given to the beliefs in “Anthropophagi, and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders.” Tyson, in his Philological Essay, gives a list, chiefly derived from classical writers, of the “monstrous Productions,” belief in which had not altogether died out in the seventeenth century. In fact, it was not long before Tyson’s time that a distinguished naturalist had given a serious description of the mermen who lived in the sea and had their hinder parts covered with scales.[[16]] Tyson’s account of “Monstrous sorts of Men” is taken mainly from Strabo:—
[16]. v. Cunningham, p. 24.
Such are the Amukteres or Arrhines, that want Noses, and have only two holes above their Mouth; they eat all things, but they must be raw; they are short lived; the upper part of their Mouths is very prominent. The Enotokeitai, whose Ears reach down to their Heels, on which they lye and sleep. The Astomoi, that have no Mouths—a civil sort of People, that dwell about the Head of the Ganges; and live upon smelling to boil’d Meats and the Odours of Fruits and Flowers; they can bear no ill scent, and therefore can’t live in a Camp. The Monommatoi or Monophthalmoi, that have but one Eye, and that in the middle of their Foreheads: they have Dogs’ Ears; their Hair stands on end, but smooth on the Breasts. The Sternophthalmoi, that have Eyes in their Breasts. The Panai sphenokephaloi with Heads like Wedges. The Makrokephaloi, with great Heads. The Huperboreoi, who live a Thousand years. The Okupodes, so swift that they will out-run a Horse. The Opisthodaktuloi, that go with their Heels forward, and their Toes backwards. The Makroskeleis, the Steganopodes, the Monoskeleis, who have one Leg, but will jump a great way, and are call’d Sciapodes, because when they lye on their Backs, with this Leg they can keep the Sun from their bodies.
Wild Men.
Linnæus did not include these in his Homo Monstrosus; but various questionable creatures are inserted by his pupil Hoppius in the treatise Anthropomorpha of Linnæus, read in 1760.[[17]] Such were the Satyr of Vulpius, who, “when it went to bed, put its head on the pillow, and covered its shoulders with the counterpane, and lay quite quiet like a respectable woman”; Lucifer (Homo caudatus), the “dreadful foul animals—running about like cats,” who rowed in boats, attacked and killed a boatload of adventurers, cooking and eating their bodies; and the Troglodyta (Homo nocturnus), who in the East Indies “are caught and made use of in houses as servants to do the lighter domestic work—as to carry water, lay the table, and take away the plates.” But all these were classed among the Simiæ. Within the species Homo sapiens Linnæus included wild or natural man, Homo sapiens ferus, whose existence was widely believed in at the time. The most authentic case was that of “Wild Peter,” the naked brown boy discovered in 1724 in Hanover. He could not speak, and showed savage and brutish habits and only a feeble degree of intelligence. He was sent to London, and, under the charge of Dr. Arbuthnot, became a noted personage, and the subject of keen discussion among philosophers and naturalists. One of his admirers, more enthusiastic than the others, declared that his discovery was more important than that of Uranus, or the discovery of thirty thousand new stars.
[17]. Bendyshe, p. 447.
Blumenbach alone, apparently, took the trouble to investigate the origin of Wild Peter, and in the article he wrote on the subject disposed for all time of the belief in the existence of “natural man.” He pointed out that when Peter was first met he wore fastened round his neck the torn fragments of a shirt, and that the whiteness of his thighs, as compared with the brown of his legs, showed that he had been wearing breeches and no stockings. He finally proved that Peter was the dumb child of a widower, who had been thrust out of his home by a new step-mother.[[18]]
[18]. Cunningham, pp. 24-5.