Table of Contents
Within Australian historiography, the procurement of indigenous Australian ancestral remains by European scientists has generally been explained as resulting from the desire to produce evidence refining the core assumptions of Darwinian theory. I have argued elsewhere (1998, 1999) that the procurement of anatomical specimens through desecration of indigenous burial places in fact began shortly after the establishment of the penal settlement of New South Wales in 1788. It also seems clear that from the early 1880s indigenous burial places were plundered with a view to producing knowledge that would answer various questions about the origins and nature of racial difference that emerged as a consequence of the rapid and widespread assent given Darwinian evolutionary theory (Turnbull 1991).
In this chapter, I want to show that the motivations of British metropolitan and colonial scientists in illegally procuring body parts in the first fifteen or so years after the 1859 publication of the Origin of Species were intellectually more heterodox than has hitherto been appreciated. The theft of indigenous Australian bones between 1860 and the mid-1870s did not arise simply from the desire of Darwinians to verify and refine the hypothesis that humanity had developed through speciation. Rather, the plunder of ancestral burial sites occurred because Aboriginal bones took on disparate meanings within the context of rivalry between prominent early Darwinians and the leadership of the Anthropology Society of London. As is well known to historians of racial thought, in early 1863 a split occurred in the Ethnological Society.[1] A faction of about a dozen members led by James Hunt (1833-1869) and C. Carter Blake (c. 1840-1887) broke away to form a new organization, the Anthropological Society of London. For several years this group had sought to reform the Ethnological Society from within, arguing that race was the true foundational principle of anthropological research. By this reasoning, differences in lifeways, social institutions, and forms of cultural expression were all manifestations of racial difference and only truly explicable when interpreted in the light of comparative anatomical delineation of presumed physiological and psychological differences amongst the races of man. Moreover, they believed racial differences to be biologically immutable and highly suggestive of the plurality of human origins — the doctrine that by the mid-nineteenth century was known as polygeny.
For Hunt and his supporters, race was all. They had grown increasingly frustrated by the polite reception the Ethnological Society gave admirers of the writings of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) and James Cowles Prichard (1786-1848) who had explained human racial differences as having arisen through environmental modifications of a single ancestral type.[2] However, what provoked them to form a new organization was the growing epistemological credence given within the Ethnological Society to the Darwinian theory of organic evolution through speciation (Van Keuren 1982:29-30). The acrimonious relations between leading Darwinians and the leadership of the Anthropological Society have been appraised by several historians of Victorian anthropological thought.[3] This chapter explores one of the key consequences of these metropolitan debates — their stimulation of scientific trafficking in indigenous remains from Australia and elsewhere.
It was largely in the context of seeking to establish Darwinian evolutionary theory as scientific orthodoxy against the claims of members of the Anthropological Society that scientists such as Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895), George Busk (1807-1886), and George Rolleston (1829-1881) sought out the bones of indigenous Australians. Because they saw skeletons and skulls as reflecting the evolutionary history of specific human populations from one ancestral form, they eagerly encouraged the desecration of burial places by colonial agents. However, members of the Anthropological Society were equally energetic in seeking to procure indigenous Australian remains. Indeed, the most successful collector of indigenous Australian skeletal material of the Victorian era, Joseph Barnard Davis (1801-1881), was no Darwinian but one of the most prominent among the early 'Anthropological' critics of the idea of human speciation. Davis confidently believed that comparative anatomical examination of mainland Australian and especially Tasmanian indigenous bones would yield compelling proof of the historical immutability of racial difference. By proving the unchanging racial characters of these native races, such theorists would not only overturn the Darwinian account of organic development but also strengthen their own case for reforming anthropological practice to focus on investigating how race determined the varying lifeways and social institutions of the different people of the earth.
The chapter also touches on how the appropriation of Aboriginal remains within rival branches of metropolitan science between 1860 and the mid-1870s had profound and pernicious consequences for indigenous Australians. I suggest that such remains were instrumental in transforming widespread European perceptions of indigenous population decline into proof of the inevitability of Aboriginal extinction. For both Darwinians and members of the Anthropological Society — for different reasons — were led by their examination of what we now know to be superficial anatomical peculiarities to conclude that indigenous Australians were racially incapable of adapting to the changes to their way of life wrought by European colonization. This shared intellectual position resonated fatally with decades of colonial assumptions on the settlement frontiers of Australia.
I begin by examining how race was fundamental to the conceptual vocabulary of both Darwinians and their Anthropological Society critics, but understood in very different ways. One economical yet informative way of doing this is to consider the controversial reception of one of the most infamous of mid-Victorian racial texts, James Hunt's The Negro's Place in Nature (1864). In this widely circulated pamphlet, Hunt outlined a prima facie case for classifying African people as a species distinct from and inferior to Europeans. Having already gained notoriety in intellectual circles in London because of his sympathy for the Confederate States and their defence of slavery, Hunt provocatively read the first part of The Negro's Place in Nature as a paper before the 1863 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Not unexpectedly, advance publicity ensured that his audience included abolitionists who loudly hissed as he spoke; but what proved unsettling for Hunt was finding himself entangled in debate with William Craft (1824-1900), an ex-slave.[4]
In the question time following Hunt's paper, Craft introduced himself, ironically, as one 'not of pure African descent' but nonetheless 'black enough to say a few words' about Hunt's taking the skull as a reliable indicator of racial origin and intellectual prowess. Craft rejected the notion that measuring the characteristic differences in cranial shape between European and African peoples produced clear evidence of the latter's racial inferiority. He did not dispute that there were morphological differences, notably in the relatively greater thickness of the bones of Negro skulls. Where he differed was in seeing this variation as 'wisely arranged by Providence'. For had God not provided Africans with thick skulls, he declared, the tropical climate they inhabited would have ensured that their brains would 'probably have become very much like those of many scientific gentlemen of the present day'. Craft did not dispute the existence of racial peculiarities but found it sorrowful 'that scientific and learned men should waste their time in discussing a subject that could prove of no benefit to mankind', instead of accepting the wealth of evidence exemplifying the 'independence of character and intellectual power on the part of the Negro' (Hunt 1863:389).
To Hunt's annoyance, Craft's critique triggered additional testimony from members of the audience with first-hand experience of social conditions in the West Indies and Africa, to the effect that slavery and colonial oppression were the true causes of what Hunt claimed was an innate African incapacity for civilization. Hunt's supporters moved to close discussion, praising his determination to argue purely from the basis of facts and regretting that 'philanthropy' had clouded what had been a purely scientific discussion. Smarting from Craft's moral dissection, Hunt could not forgo securing the final word. In doing so, however, he stepped outside the limits of scientific discourse. In a manner reminiscent of the celebrated 1860 debate on evolution between Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Henry Huxley, Hunt (1863:391) resorted to ridicule and in doing so severely damaged his scientific credibility by social impoliteness. Like Craft he too was sorry, he exclaimed — sorry that scientific discourse should be opposed 'by poetical clap-trap, or by gratuitous and worthless assumptions'.
Craft's defence of the African illustrates the widespread salience that monogenetic environmentalist accounts of racial difference still enjoyed in Britain during the 1860s. He was able to reaffirm the fundamental truth claims of this tradition by demonstrating its continuing capacity to explain historical events and providing eyewitness testimony as to the intellectual power of men and women of African descent. He did so particularly by exposing the thin evidence on which Hunt's correlation of African bodily peculiarities with recorded or observable behaviour rested. In the absence of robust evidence to the contrary, Craft had argued, the fact that anatomical studies had shown Africans to have thicker skulls did nothing to unsettle the case for providential design as the most plausible account and, indeed, a more scientific explanation than any Hunt had produced, by virtue of its commensurability with the wealth of testimony to the intellectual abilities of Africans who had secured their freedom.
Craft's critique of Hunt further serves to illuminate the fact that Darwinians and Anthropological Society members were consciously engaged in a contest to reinterpret the monogenetic environmentalist tradition. It was, moreover, a contest in which Darwinians enjoyed a distinct intellectual advantage. For by the early 1860s, subscribers to monogenetic environmentalism could draw upon two powerful explanatory resources. One was the encyclopaedic research of James Cowles Prichard. The other was the widely admired philosophical comparative anatomy of Richard Owen (1804-1892). Prichard and Owen equally regarded the diversity of life as the expression of the divine mind. By virtue of its perfection, the divine will obviated the need for the subsequent emergence of new organic forms though, as the fossil record showed, it allowed for the extinction of certain species. Species might come to exhibit diversity but only to the extent that they reflected the divine intention that each be perfectly suited to inhabit a preordained place in the order of creation. Hence, this tradition was able to envisage human history as evolutionary insofar as it accepted that organisms were subject to biological processes designed to ensure that they became most perfectly suited to the environment which they were providentially destined to inhabit (Rupke 1994:224-30). Darwinians consequently found themselves sharing substantial common ground with monogenetic environmentalists. Where they disagreed was on how far humanity could undergo organic change (Stocking 1973:lv-lvi). By way of contrast, the static physical anthropology espoused by Hunt and his circle had little if any commensurability with monogenetic environmentalism.
Though they stressed that Hunt had merely sought to present the 'simple facts' of race, the leaders of the Anthropological Society were aware that the empirical evidence for classifying Europeans and Africans as separate species was far less substantial than it needed to be. In fact, we should do well to read The Negro's Place in Nature as a manifesto for the new Anthropological Society. As the pamphlet makes clear, its founders envisaged the new society as providing an institutional basis and direction for a new science of race, anchored in the study of racial anatomy. In doing so, they looked enviously towards France. Indeed, they chose the name Anthropological Society because of the widespread use of the term 'anthropology' by French anatomists since the early years of the nineteenth century to describe the comparative study of human anatomy, morphology, and physiology. French state sponsorship of the biomedical and natural sciences from the revolutionary era had provided a stronger institutional context for the study of humanity than the network of national and provincial scientific societies and clubs that characterized British intellectual life during the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century. By virtue of its location within Parisian biomedical institutions, the study of human difference had developed a more coherent program of research that was informed by, and in turn gave additional intellectual weight to, the body of theory relating to the nature and origins of organic life-forms propounded by Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772-1844), and their successors. This research had also become more focused on employing instrumentation to determine statistical regularities in the typical form of organic structures.
Several figures closely associated with the Anthropological Society had either studied medicine in Paris or with Parisian-trained researchers. The most influential was Robert Knox (1791-1862), the charismatic Edinburgh anatomist. Knox (1823-4) had first become interested in the anatomical differences between African peoples and Europeans while serving as an army medical surgeon in southern Africa between 1817 and 1820. During the course of subsequent continental studies, he embraced and idiosyncratically sought to synthesize and refine the transmutationist views of Jean-Baptiste de Monet de Lamarck (1744-1829) and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (Goodsir 1868:26-7). After establishing himself as an anatomy teacher in Edinburgh, Knox began to offer special lectures on comparative human anatomy in which he reflected a growing conviction that differences in the typical form of bones within indigenous African, American, and Australian populations were so pronounced as to suggest that they were separate species which had developed from different ancestral forms. For the remainder of his life, Knox sought to refine his racial taxonomy through anatomical inquiries. As recalled by Carter Blake (1870:335), an ex-pupil of Knox and member of the first executive of the Anthropological Society, the anatomist 'could not glance at a cranium for the common descriptive anatomy without speaking of its ethnological bearings…. [E]ven when walking along the streets thronged with men and women, he was always on the qui vive for race features'. Disgraced by his involvement in the Burke and Hare body-snatching scandal of 1828‑9 and then near-bankrupted by the inclusion of anatomy in the Edinburgh University medical curriculum in the mid-1830s, Knox was severely constrained in his own ability to procure and examine comparative anatomical specimens. Nonetheless, he vigorously encouraged those of his past students who had found employment as naval surgeons or colonial medical officers to gather as much information as they could about non-European peoples they might encounter and, most importantly and wherever possible, to procure skeletal material and soft tissue structures for metropolitan anatomical collections.
During the 1840s, Knox turned to popular lecturing on race. His lectures (1850) were a heady mix of anatomical demonstration and racial reinterpretation of history peppered with scathing criticisms of contemporary religious leaders, intellectuals, and politicians for downplaying the crucial significance of race as the principal determinant of human affairs. Knox died just before the foundation of the Anthropological Society but he was a powerful source of inspiration to its leadership which envisaged the new society as a source of institutional support and intellectual direction to the anatomical study of racial difference. However, the society's claim to be the first and sole body truly devoted to disclosing the meanings of race through empirical study was vigorously disputed by leading Darwinians who regarded themselves as more rigorously committed to elucidating the meanings of racial difference through inductive reasoning.
Francis Galton (1822-1911), for example, heard and was unimpressed by Hunt's discourse on African inferiority at the 1863 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. By this time, Galton (1908:288) had been led by the Origin of Species 'to pursue many new inquiries … clustered round the central topics of Heredity and the possible improvement of the Human Race'. While it was not until the mid-1880s that Galton felt confident he could adequately describe how hereditary characteristics were transmitted, by 1863 he was convinced that Darwin's concept of natural selection was far more powerful an explanation than the static racialism propounded by Knox and his admirers in the Anthropological Society. For if, as Hunt now claimed, members of primitive races inherited identical qualities of intellect, how could they explain the wealth of empirical evidence for the production by even the most primitive races of at least some 'able men capable of taking an equal position with Europeans'? Indeed, Galton asked Hunt after his paper, if no racially pure African had the psychological capacity to embrace civilization, as Hunt had claimed, how could 'so degraded a people … furnish men capable of constructing nations out of the loosest materials?' (Hunt 1863:387‑8).
Galton's treatment of Hunt was gentle in comparison to that of other influential Darwinians. In the course of delivering the 1864 Hunterian Lectures at the Royal College of Surgeons, Huxley (1872:20) gleefully catalogued Hunt's 'aberrations from scientific fact or fair speculation' when reviewing what leading continental anatomists had actually discovered by post-mortem dissection of black corpses over the previous thirty years. Rolleston, a fellow Darwinian and Oxford's Linacre Professor of Anatomy and Physiology, openly belittled Hunt's scientific pretensions and privately queried whether he was in the pay of Confederate agents (Desmond 1994:326). Hunt and several other prominent members of the Anthropological Society responded by accusing Huxley in particular of having wilfully misrepresented Hunt's intentions. The Negro's Place in Nature was never intended as a definitive account of African inferiority but as a call for focused research into the racial distinctiveness of the African and other primitive races. The fact that Huxley and his colleagues seemed uninterested in undertaking such research underscored the rationale for establishing the Anthropological Society (Anon. 1863:107). Society members also charged Huxley with having attacked Hunt because of his pro-slavery views and queried whether his antagonism was unconnected with the fact that key elements of Darwin's theory — such as the existence of intermediate forms between species — lacked empirical verification.[5]
While the leadership of the Anthropological Society steadfastly believed that its program of anatomical research would produce evidence proving beyond doubt the plural origins of humanity and the immutability of racial difference, they were conscious of only having begun to place the study of race on a truly scientific basis. There is no reason to doubt that Hunt was sincere in protesting that his views on African inferiority were in many respects tentative and open to revision. While claiming that anatomical examinations strongly suggested the typical African brain to be smaller in size than the European, Hunt (1864) nonetheless readily conceded that cranial capacity alone was insufficient proof of intellectual capacity. What was needed was extensive research aimed at identifying and correlating what might possibly be complex and racially unique matrices of interrelated traits. The few published accounts of individual post-mortem dissections of adult men and women of African descent, for example, suggested to him that the African brain was more akin structurally to that of a European child. The African brain also supposedly differed markedly in terms of colour and exhibited less numerous and more massive convolutions. What had so far been found through close anatomical scrutiny of the African body suggested interesting correlations between the physical structure of the brain and what were allegedly typical African behavioural traits. But only comprehensive anatomical inquiry, he concluded, would disclose the full scientific significance of these and many other racial peculiarities likely to be found distinguishing the peoples of the earth.
Where Hunt could justly be accused of being disingenuous was in depicting his Darwinian critics as uninterested in anatomical investigation of racial characteristics. From as early as 1861, Rolleston, for example, had sought to obtain brains of the different varieties of mankind so as to illuminate whether psychological differences might be explained by racially typical aspects of cerebral structure.[6] He also studied homologies in shoulder musculature and teeth enamel in some detail with a view to disclosing evidence of evolutionary processes (F[lower] 1881). Huxley (1900:205‑9) documented cranial variations between the fossil crania and modern 'primitives' to show how they formed a series highly suggestive of evolutionary refinement. In short, for all the differences between Darwinians and their polygenist opponents, both regarded the human body as an ensemble of markers of racial affiliation. Irrespective of their selection of bones or soft tissues or their methods of measurement, both camps implicitly assumed that the true course of human natural history would only be disclosed through regimented, statistically significant measurement and racial differentiation of bodily structures.
[1] The Ethnological Society of London was founded in late 1843 through the agency of Richard King, a physician and secretary of the Aborigines Protection Society. King and several other members of the Aborigines Protection Society believed that the world's 'savage' nations were destined to extinction in the wake of colonialism and that it was of crucial scientific and philosophical importance that their physical and moral characteristics be studied before they became no more than a history memory. See especially Stocking 1987:240-5.
[2] Blumenbach 1781, 1795; Prichard 1813, 1836-47. See Chapter One (Douglas), this volume.
[3] See especially Ellingson 2001; Stocking 1987; Van Keuren 1982; Young 1995.
[4] Hunt 1863; Craft and Craft 1860.
[5] E.g., Anon. 1863:114-17; Reddie 1864:cxv-cxix.
[6] This is clearly evident from items of correspondence in the Rolleston Papers detailing his efforts to secure non-European brains from British port cities (Rolleston c. 1850-81: Box 2).