This classification was of very doubtful value. Like that of Camper, it overlooked many important characteristics. It was partly to escape such objections that Owen proposed to examine skulls, not from the top, but from the bottom. One of the chief results of this new method was to show such a strong and definite line of difference between a man and an orang-outang that it became for ever impossible to find the link that Camper imagined to exist between the two species. In fact, one glance at the two skulls, from Owen’s point of view, is enough to bring out their radical difference. The diameter from front to back is longer in the orang-outang than in man; the zygomatic arch, instead of being wholly in the front part of the base, is in the middle, and occupies just a third of its diameter. Finally the position of the occipital orifice, which has such a marked influence on general structure and habits, is quite different. In the skull of a man, it is almost at the centre of the base; in that of an orang-outang, it is a sixth of the way from the hinder end.[[53]]
Owen’s observations have, no doubt, considerable value; I would prefer, however, the most recent of the craniological systems, which is at the same time, in many ways, the most ingenious, I mean that of the American scholar Morton, adopted by Carus.[[54]] In outline this is as follows:
To show the difference of races, Morton and Carus started from the idea, that the greater the size of the skull, the higher the type to which the individual belonged, and they set out to investigate whether the development of the skull is equal in all the human races.
To solve this question, Morton took a certain number of heads belonging to whites, Mongols, negroes, and Redskins of North America. He stopped all the openings with cotton, except the foramen magnum, and completely filled the inside with carefully dried grains of pepper. He then compared the number of grains in each. This gave him the following table:
| Number of skulls measured. | Average number of grains. | Maximum number of grains. | Minimum number of grains. | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| White races | 52 | 87 | 109 | 75 | |
| Yellow races | Mongols | 10 | 83 | 93 | 69 |
| Malays | 18 | 81 | 89 | 64 | |
| Redskins | 147 | 82 | 100 | 60 | |
| Negroes | 29 | 78 | 94 | 65 | |
The results set down in the first two columns are certainly very curious. On the other hand, I attach little importance to those in the last two; for if the extraordinary variations from the average in the second column are to have any real significance, Morton should have taken a far greater number of skulls, and further, have given details as to the social position of those to whom the skulls belonged. He was probably able to procure, in the case of the whites and the Redskins, heads which had belonged to men at any rate above the lowest level of society, while it is not likely that he had access to the skulls of negro chiefs, or of Chinese mandarins. This explains how he has been able to assign the number 100 to an American Indian, while the most intelligent Mongol whom he has examined does not rise above 93, and is thus inferior even to the negro, who reaches 94. Such results are a mere matter of chance. They are quite incomplete and unscientific; in such questions, however, one cannot be too careful to avoid judgments founded merely on individual cases. I am inclined therefore to reject altogether the second half of Morton’s calculations.
I must also question one detail in the other half. In the second column, there is a clear gradation from the number 87, indicating the capacity of the white man’s skull, to the numbers 83 and 78 for the yellow and black man respectively. But the figures 83, 81, 82, for the Mongols, Malays, and Redskins, give average results which evidently shade into one another; all the more so, because Carus does not hesitate to count the Mongols and Malays as the same race, and consequently to put the numbers 83 and 81 together. But, in that case, why allow the number 82 to mark a distinct race, and thus create arbitrarily a fourth great division of mankind?
This anomaly, however, actually buttresses the weak point in Carus’ system. He likes to think that, just as we see our planet pass through the four stages of day and night, evening and morning twilight, so there must be in the human species four subdivisions corresponding to these. He sees here a symbol, which is always a temptation for a subtle mind. Carus yields to it, as many of his learned fellow-countrymen would have done in his place. The white races are the nations of the day; the black those of the night; the yellow those of the Eastern, and the red those of the Western twilight. We may easily guess the ingenious comparisons suggested by such a picture. Thus, the European nations, owing to the brilliance of their scientific knowledge and the clear outlines of their civilization, are obviously in the full glare of day, while the negroes sleep in the darkness of ignorance, and the Chinese live in a half-light that gives them an incomplete, though powerful, social development. As for the Redskins, who are gradually disappearing from the earth, where can we find a more beautiful image of their fate than the setting sun?
Unhappily, comparison is not proof, and by yielding too easily to this poetic impulse, Carus has a little damaged his fine theory. The same charge also may be levelled at this as at the other ethnological doctrines; Carus does not manage to include in a systematic whole the various physiological differences between one race and another.[[55]]
The supporters of the theory of racial unity have not failed to seize on this weak point, and to claim that, where we cannot arrange the observations on the shape of the skull in such a way as to constitute a proof of the original separation of types, we must no longer consider the variations as pointing to any radical difference, but merely regard them as the result of secondary and isolated causes, with no specific relevance.