It was not until the nineteenth century that a really scientific method of classification was adopted. In the majority of these schemes the character of the hair was chosen as the primary race-characteristic.
Pruner Bey.
The hair had already been studied by Heusinger (1822), by Blower, of Philadelphia, and by Kölliker, the histologist, before the publication of Pruner Bey’s classic memoir, read before the Paris Anthropological Society in 1863, and published in the same year. Dr. Pruner Bey claimed that the quality of the hair constituted one of the best means of race-identification, and even that “a single hair presenting the average form characteristic of the race might serve to define it.”
Bory de St. Vincent.
Long before this, in 1827, Bory de Saint-Vincent had chosen the hair as the chief test in race-classification, and divided mankind into the Leiotrichi, or straight-haired, and the Ulotrichi, or woolly-haired—a nomenclature afterwards adopted by Professor Huxley (1870).[[72]] But Bory de Saint-Vincent’s classification was robbed of permanent scientific value by his inclusion as distinct races of such vague abstractions as “Scythians,” “Neptunians,” and “Columbians.”
[72]. Journ. Eth. Soc. (N.S.), II.
Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.
Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1858) distributed his eleven principal races primarily according to the character of the hair, sub-divided according to the flatness or projection of the nose, skin-colour, the shape of the skull, and the character of the face.[[73]]
[73]. Cf. Topinard, 1885, p. 264.
Haeckel.