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.