Dr. Hagen relates the extreme specialisation into which craniologists were led:—
A rage for skull measurements, vast, vigorous, and heedless, set in on all sides, especially after Lucae had discovered and perfected a method of accurately representing the irregular form of the object studied. “More skulls” was henceforth the war-cry; the trunk, extremities, soft tissues, skin and hair, might all go by the board, being counted of no scientific value whatever. Anthropologists, or those who aspired to the title, measured and delineated skulls; museums became veritable cities of skulls, and the reputation of a scientific traveller almost stood or fell with the number of crania which he brought back with him.
After two decades of measuring and collecting ever greater quantities of material from foreign lands, and from the so-called primitive or aboriginal races, the inadequacy of Retzius’s method became apparent. Far too many intermediate forms were met with, which it was found absolutely impossible to classify by its means. In accordance with the suggestion of the French anthropologist Broca, and of Welcker, Professor of Anatomy at Halle, a third type, the so-called Mesocephalic form, was interposed between the two forms recognised by Retzius. Even this did not suffice, however. In the face of the infinite variety of form of the crania now massed together, a variety only comparable to that of leaves in a forest, this primitively simple scheme, with its four and finally six types, failed through lack of elasticity. Then began complication extending ever further and further. Attention was no longer confined to the length and breadth, but also to the height of the cranium, high and low (or flat) skulls—i.e., hypsicephalic and chamaecephalic varieties being recognised. The facial part of the skull was examined not only from the side, with a view to recording the straightness or obliquity of the profile, but also from the front; and there were thus distinguished long, medium, and short faces, and also broad and narrow facial types. The nasal skeleton, the palate, the orbit, the teeth, and the mandible were investigated in turn, and at last all the individual bones of the cranium and face, their irregularities of outline, and their relations to one another, were subjected to the closest examination and most subtle measurements, with instruments of extreme delicacy of construction and ingenuity of design, till, finally, the trifling number of five thousand measurements for every skull found an advocate in the person of the Hungarian Professor V. Török (whereby the wealth of detail obscured the main objects of study); while, on the other hand, observers deviated into scientific jugglery, like that of the Italian Professor Sergi, who contrived to recognise within the limits of a single small archipelago, the D’Entrecasteaux group of islets near New Guinea, as many as eleven cranial varieties, which were all distinguished by high-sounding descriptive names, such as Lophocephalus brachyclitometopus, etc.
Macalister’s Criticism of Craniometry.
The misuse of Craniometry is also described by Professor Alexander Macalister[[28]]:—
[28]. Presidential Address to Section H., Brit. Ass., 1892.
Despite all the labour that has been bestowed on the subject, craniometric literature is at present as unsatisfactory as it is dull. Hitherto observations have been concentrated on cranial measurements as methods for the discrimination of the skulls of different races. Scores of lines, arcs, chords, and indexes have been devised for this purpose, and the diagnosis of skulls has been attempted by a process as mechanical as that whereby we identify certain issues of postage-stamps by counting the nicks in the margin. But there is underlying all these no unifying hypothesis; so that when we, in our sesquipedalian jargon, describe an Australian skull as microcephalic, phænozygous, tapeino-dolichocephalic, prognathic, platyrhine, hypselopalatine, leptostaphyline, dolichuranic, chamaeprosopic, and microseme, we are no nearer to the formulation of any philosophic concept of the general principles which have led to the assumption of these characters by the cranium in question, and we are forced to echo the apostrophe of Von Török, “Vanity, thy name is Craniology.”
It is significant that so many of the earlier craniologists recognised that the really important problem before them was to gain a knowledge of the size and relative proportions of the various regions of the brain, this being a direct result of the phrenological studies then so much in vogue. When phrenology became discredited, this aspect of craniometry was largely neglected; but recently it has exhibited signs of a healthy revival, and the inner surface of the cranium is now regarded as more instructive than the outer.
Though for a time craniology was hailed as the magic formula by which alone all ethnological tangles could be unravelled, measurements of other parts of the body were not ignored by those who recognised that no one measurement was sufficient to determine racial affinities.
Anthropometry.