The centrality of bodily measurement within anatomical and anthropological circles meant that much of the interaction between metropolitan racial scientists and their Australian colonial correspondents during the 1860s centred on the procurement of indigenous bodies and the interpretation of their supposed racial characteristics. Darwinians sought indigenous Australian bodily remains in the belief that they would yield important evidence of ancestral relations between races that over time had come to exhibit morphologically distinct physical and psychological characteristics. Those who subscribed to static racialist explanations of human origins were equally, if not more, anxious to amass evidence of racial peculiarities, believing that accurate determination of the contours of race would show the immutability of certain key racial characteristics, thus proving that humanity could not have evolved from a common ancestral type.

However, in seeking to map racial characteristics, researchers faced a serious difficulty. As Berthold Seeman (1825-1871) warned fellow members of the Anthropology Society in June 1863, skulls alone were insufficient to determine racial identity. In many instances, it was also necessary to examine soft tissue. Indeed, he told the society, 'I myself should like to see in London an anthropological garden, something on the same principle as the Zoological Gardens, where living specimens of the principal varieties of the human race might be seen and compared'.^[7] Yet, as the Darwinian palaeontologist George Busk lamented in 1861:

Busk knew first-hand from over twenty years as visiting surgeon to the Dreadnought hospital ship at Greenwich how few opportunities for studying racially interesting soft tissue occurred.^[8] Accepting that the study of human racial difference should necessarily be restricted to bones, Busk (1861) believed it essential that they be made to reveal as much as possible and to this end he personally invested much time developing new cranial measuring techniques and instruments. However, by the early 1860s, he and many fellow anatomists feared that they were working against time. Opportunities for procuring even skeletal material were threatened by what seemed the impending extinction of the world's more primitive and scientifically interesting races.

The concept of racial extinction was hardly novel. At least since the 1830s, many British intellectuals and colonial administrators had thought it possible that some races would disappear as a consequence of the expropriation of their homelands by European settlers. By this time, it was common knowledge that in South Africa and the Australian colonies resistance to settler ambition had frequently led to the indiscriminate killing of indigenous peoples. However, few if any ethnographers believed that settler violence alone explained the collapse of native populations. Rather, a wealth of eyewitness testimony to the impact of diseases and the prevalence of infertility and supposed social anomie was interpreted as highly suggestive that the demise of peoples such as the 'aborigines of New Holland' was providentially ordained.

What was new in the early 1860s was the conviction amongst racial scientists that the pace of extinction had accelerated to the point that several races were on the verge of disappearing. Indeed, the fact that only several 'full-blooded' native Tasmanians remained alive convinced such theorists that the race had effectively become extinct. This conviction, moreover, gained cognitive strength from the additional empirical weight that the apparent decline of indigenous populations gave to the core theoretical assumptions of both Darwinians and static racialists. Darwinians saw the drama of racial extinction supposedly being played out in the Australian colonies as further proof that, like all other forms of organic life, humanity had evolved through natural selection. With the spread of settler society, the native Australian race was naturally being subsumed by the more advanced European. Critics of Darwinian explanations who believed in the plurality of human origin interpreted the supposed extinction of races such as the Tasmanians as one further historical episode in which two races of unequal physiology and intellect had sought to occupy the same territory. For polygenists, the scientific significance of studying the typical bodily characteristics of these vanquished races lay in producing evidence that racial conflict did not result in hybrid beings who over time would become the ancestors of a new race.

The new intellectual salience assumed by the premise of racial extinction during the 1860s heightened the desire of both Darwinians and polygenists to secure anatomical evidence likely to prove the truth of their respective accounts of human natural history. It made authorities in both camps even more concerned to secure the bones of races believed to be close to extinction. To this end, they sought to enlist the help of colonial scientists, museum personnel, medical practitioners, and amateur naturalists, representing the collection of remains as a means for them to make an invaluable contribution to the progress of British anthropological science.

Amongst Darwinians, Rolleston was particularly active in cultivating Australian collectors. Until his death in 1881, Rolleston was successful in promoting a slow but steady flow of indigenous skeletal material to Oxford by two avenues. One was through his brother Christopher Rolleston (1817-1888) who had been nearly thirty years in New South Wales when he was appointed auditor-general of the colony in 1864. Among the specimens yielded through this family connection were four skulls stolen from a burial place on a cattle station owned by Christopher in western central Queensland.^[9] The other means by which George Rolleston secured remains was through former students practicing medicine in the Australian colonies. In 1869, for example, he received the skull of a Wiradjuri woman from H.M. Rowland, by this time a physician in the Bathurst district. The skull had been removed from a burial place unearthed during the clearing of scrub.^[10] In the same year, Rolleston received a case containing five skulls obtained from another former pupil residing in Adelaide who had employed a local natural history collector to secure him skulls from a traditional burial site near the Murray River entrance. Two of the skulls, belonging to a man and his wife only buried in 1862, were the last remaining at the site. However, as the collector informed Rolleston's former student:

The question of how Aboriginal people reacted to these desecrations is beyond the scope of this paper. However, there is a wealth of archival evidence and oral testimony illustrative of Aboriginal determination to protect the dead (Turnbull 2002).

Around 1870, Rolleston received the complete skeleton of a man from the Port Augusta region of South Australia from another former pupil, J. Marshall Stokes, who informed Rolleston that the man, who had died in 1869, was in his opinion 'considerably below the average stature of his tribe and I always fancy weakly so as not to be taken as a type of his race physically'. While he was a willing participant in the production of racial knowledge, Stokes's encounters with living indigenous Australians had left him convinced that the common perception of the Australian race as limited in intellectual capacity was 'very mistaken'.^[12] Also in Rolleston's hands by 1872 was a skull procured from a burial place on a sheep station (ironically named Oxford Downs) 130 kilometres west of Mackay in central Queensland. The skull had been obtained for him by George Marten who had been an undergraduate at Pembroke College in the early 1860s. Marten, now growing sugar in the Mackay district, had acquired the skull on learning of Rolleston's desire for aboriginal remains from a neighbour, W.R. Davidson, another ex-student of the anatomist. In sending the skull, Marten wrote that he would be 'glad to know if there is any special objects of interest that I might be in the way of procuring in Queensland' and 'glad to do anything we could in the cause of science'.^[13]

Lacking a network comparable to that enjoyed by Rolleston, other Darwinians proved less successful in securing donations of Australian skeletal material. Busk, for example, managed to obtain no more than two or three crania. Huxley had better but still relatively limited success. Among the colonists he approached was the mining engineer and colonial ethnographer Robert Brough Smyth (?-1899), author of the compendious Aborigines of Victoria (1878). Interestingly, Smyth — unlike Darwin himself — had no difficulty in reconciling the latter's theory of organic development through speciation with the essential truths of Christianity as they were understood within liberal Anglican circles. In a lecture to the Bendigo Working Men's Club in 1886 (1856-89:4 [c]), he declared that providence had bestowed on man two books of supreme wisdom: the Bible and The Origin of Species. As secretary and later chair of Victoria's Board for the Protection of Aborigines during the 1860s, Smyth accordingly saw no tension between administering a regime in which conversion to Christianity was regarded as an essential precondition for civilizing the colony's indigenous inhabitants and subjecting them to scientific examination of their presumed racial peculiarities on behalf of leading metropolitan Darwinians. Nor indeed did Smyth (1856‑89:4 [d]) have any qualms about approaching Victoria's colonial secretary to procure the skeleton of an Aboriginal elder given Christian burial in the Melbourne general cemetery. Through Smyth, Huxley came in contact with Christopher D'Oyly H. Aplin (1819-1875), a surveyor with the Victorian Geological Survey Office. Aplin in turn willingly approached landowners on Huxley's behalf, eventually securing him three skulls. One, Aplin wrote, was 'found by some friends of mine in an excavation made by them for the purpose of examining the nature of the large mounds or "myrnong heaps" rather numerous in the Western Districts of the colony'. The other two were obtained after being exposed by erosion in sand dunes at Port Fairy.^[14]

Amongst those whose aid Huxley sought to enlist was Johann Ludwig Gerard Krefft (1830-1881), curator of Sydney's Australian Museum from 1864 to 1872. By the time of his appointment, Gerard Krefft had established a modest reputation as a taxonomist with leading metropolitan British anatomists. Since the late 1850s, he had supplied numerous rare vertebrate fossils to Richard Owen at the British Museum and published descriptions of new Australian reptiles and fish species in several London scientific journals. Krefft had closely followed the debates between Darwinians and followers of Owen and could not have been unaware that the question of human origins was now a tripartite contest in which both Owenites and Darwinians alike were targets of the static physical anthropologists of the Anthropology Society. Indeed, Krefft realized that by virtue of his ability to procure and examine native Australian bodies, he was uniquely situated to gain fame in metropolitan scientific circles by producing knowledge to help resolve the question of the significance of human racial differences. One of his first moves on being appointed curator was to instruct the Museum's assistant George Masters (1837–1912) to remove remains from indigenous burial places encountered on collecting expeditions. In May 1865, Masters wrote to Krefft on returning from the countryside west of Ipswich, in southern Queensland, informing him that he had shipped to the Museum a variety of skins and skeletons, including the bones of an Aboriginal woman.^[15] Krefft also alerted the many amateur natu­ralists who regularly donated zoological specimens that the Museum particularly desired Aboriginal skeletons. One of the first naturalists to oblige in this respect was a pasto­ralist in central Queensland who wrote to Krefft in September 1865 that he had not only 'got the bones of an alligator for you as soon as they are fit to send away' but 'also two blackfellows bur­ied in a paddock of mine on purpose to get the skeletons to send you'. The pastoralist gave no indication of how he had procured the bodies.^[16] In the same year, the Museum also received another two skeletons of central Queensland Aboriginal people donated by George Rolleston's old student W.R. Davidson.^[17]

On being approached by Huxley in 1866, Krefft provided him with basic cranial measurements of the Museum's collection and promised to help him secure skulls through James Wilcox (1823–1881), a farmer in the Grafton district of New South Wales who for some years had supplemented his income by selling bird and marsupial specimens to the Australian Museum and the Museum of Victoria. Wilcox was also known to be willing to plunder Aboriginal graves.^[18] However, this was as far as Krefft was prepared to help Huxley, being concerned to ensure that he did not enhance his relationship with metropolitan authorities at the expense of failing to enrich the holdings of his own Museum. Krefft was now unwilling to pass over any opportunity to acquire Aboriginal or other racially interesting human remains. By the early 1870s, the Museum had acquired four complete skeletons and some eighty skulls, mostly of Aboriginal and Oceanic origin (Maddock 1874:78). When Huxley again approached Krefft in 1872 wanting additional remains and in particular female Aboriginal pelvic bones, Krefft deflected the request by sending Huxley photographs of Aboriginal skulls in the Museum's collection while stressing that it was becoming increasing rare to discover burial places. 'I wish I could', he told Huxley, 'but it is very diffi­cult — we have 2 female skeletons in the Museum but I cannot send them'. He had again told a collector 'a few days ago to look out for same', but added, 'I suppose the greater portion of the native graves are obliterated'.^[19]

By the early 1870s, Krefft had two further interrelated reasons for not wanting to see remains shipped to Britain. Although he had come to believe that humanity had evolved through speciation, he was sceptical of Darwin's claim that new species emerged by a purely random process. In common with influential metropolitan figures such as George Campbell, Duke of Argyll (1823–1900), and the geologist William Dawkins (1837–1929), Krefft was inclined to think that, while varia­tion occurred through natural selection, some underlying law determined that the flow of variations moved in a pur­poseful direction.^[20] However, unlike these British authorities who had sought to reconcile speciation with Christian belief in the subordination of nature to providential design, Krefft appears to have been influenced less by Darwin's writings than by the radical pantheistic account of evolutionary processes championed by Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), the Prussian zoologist.^[21] The second reason why Krefft was unwilling to part with Aboriginal bones was that he had himself become greatly interested in the question of Aboriginal origins, largely as a result of having discovered in 1869 what he took to be a fossilized human tooth during the excavation of a cave in the Wellington Valley of central-western New South Wales.