From him we turn to another—a negro from the West Coast of Africa, tall, strong-looking, with thick-set limbs and a tendency to fat. His colour is no longer yellowish, but entirely black; his hair no longer thin and wiry, but thick, coarse, woolly, and luxuriant; his lower jaw juts out, the shape of the skull is what is known as prognathous. “The long bones stand out, the front of the tibia and the fibula are more convex than in a European, the calves are very high and reach above the knee; the feet are quite flat, and the heel-bone, instead of being arched, is almost in a straight line with the other bones of the foot, which is very large. The hand is similarly formed.”
When we look for a moment at an individual of this type, we are involuntarily reminded of the structure of the monkey, and are inclined to admit that the negro races of West Africa come from a stock that has nothing in common, except the human form, with the Mongolian.
We come next to tribes whose appearance is still less flattering to the self-love of mankind than that of the Congo negro. Oceania has the special privilege of providing the most ugly, degraded, and repulsive specimens of the race, which seem to have been created with the express purpose of forming a link between man and the brute pure and simple. By the side of many Australian tribes, the African negro himself assumes a value and dignity, and seems to derive from a nobler source. In many of the wretched inhabitants of this New World, the size of the head, the extreme thinness of the limbs, the famished look of the body, are absolutely hideous. The hair is flat or wavy, and generally woolly, the flesh is black on a foundation of grey.
When, after examining these types, taken from all the quarters of the globe, we finally come back to the inhabitants of Europe, and of South and West Asia, we find them so superior in beauty, in just proportion of limb and regularity of feature, that we are at once tempted to accept the conclusions of those who assert the multiplicity of races. Not only are these peoples more beautiful than the rest of mankind, which is, I confess, a pestilent congregation of ugliness;[[50]] not only have they had the glory of giving the world such admirable types as a Venus, an Apollo, a Farnese Hercules; but also there is a visible hierarchy of beauty established from ancient times even among themselves, and in this natural aristocracy the Europeans are the most eminent, by their grace of outline and strength of muscular developement. The most reasonable view appears to be that the families into which man is divided are as distinct as are animals of different species. Such was the conclusion drawn from simple observation, and so long as only general facts were in question, it seemed irrefutable.
Camper was one of the first to reduce these observations to some kind of system. He was no longer satisfied with merely superficial evidence, but wished to give his proofs a mathematical foundation; he tried to define anatomically the differences between races. He succeeded in establishing a strict method that left no room for doubt, and his views gained the numerical accuracy without which there can be no science. His method was to take the front part of the skull and measure the inclination of the profile by means of two lines which he called the facial lines. Their intersection formed an angle, the size of which gave the degree of elevation attained by the race to which the skull belonged. One of these lines connected the base of the nose with the orifice of the ear; the other was tangential to the most prominent part of the forehead and the jut of the upper jaw. On the basis of the angle thus formed, he constructed a scale including not only man but all kinds of animals. At the top stood the European; and the more acute the angle, the further was the distance from the type which, according to Camper, was the most perfect. Thus birds and fishes showed smaller angles than the various mammals. A certain kind of ape reached 42°, and even 50°. Then came the heads of the African negro and the Kalmuck, which touched 70°. The European stood at 80°, and, to quote the inventor’s own words, which are very flattering to our own type, “On this difference of 10° the superior beauty of the European, what one might call his ‘comparative beauty,’ depends; the ‘absolute beauty’ that is so striking in some of the works of ancient sculpture, as in the head of Apollo and the Medusa of Sosicles, is the result of a still greater angle, amounting in this instance to 100°.”[[51]]
This method was attractive by its simplicity. Unhappily, the facts are against it, as against so many systems. By a series of accurate observations, Owen showed that, in the case of monkeys, Camper had studied the skulls only of the young animals; but since, in the adults, the growth of the teeth and jaws, and the development of the zygomatic arch, were not accompanied by a corresponding enlargement of the brain, the numerical difference between these and human skulls was much greater than Camper had supposed, since the facial angle of the black orang-outang or the highest type of chimpanzee was at most 30° or 35°. From this to the 70° of the negro and the Kalmuck the gap was too great for Camper’s scale to have any significance.
Camper’s theory made considerable use of phrenology. He attempted to discover a corresponding development of instinct as he mounted his scale from the animals to man. But here too the facts were against him. The elephant, for example, whose intelligence is certainly greater than the orang-outang’s, has a far more acute facial angle; and even the most docile and intelligent monkeys do not belong to the species which are the “highest” in Camper’s series.
Beside these two great defects, the method is very open to attack in that it does not apply to all the varieties of the human race. It leaves out of account the tribes with pyramidally shaped heads, who form, however, a striking division by themselves.
Blumenbach, who held the field against his predecessor, elaborated a system in his turn; this was to study a man’s head from the top. He called his discovery norma verticalis, the “vertical method.” He was confident that the comparison of heads according to their width brought out the chief differences in the general configuration of the skull. According to him, the study of this part of the body is so pregnant with results, especially in its bearing on national character, that it is impossible to measure all the differences merely by lines and angles; to reach a satisfying basis of classification, we must consider the heads from the point of view in which we can take in at one glance the greatest number of varieties. His idea was, in outline, as follows: “Arrange the skulls that you wish to compare in such a way that the jaw-bones are on the same horizontal line; in other words, let each rest on its lower jaw. Then stand behind the skulls and fix the eye on the vertex of each. In this way you will best see the varieties of shape that have most to do with national character; these consist either (1) in the direction of the jaw-bone and maxillary, or (2) in the breadth or narrowness of the oval outline presented by the top half of the skull, or (3) in the flattened or vaulted form of the frontal bone.”[[52]]
Blumenbach’s system resulted in the division of mankind into five main categories, which were in their turn subdivided into a certain number of types and classes.