Darwinians were not alone in hunting indigenous bones. Leading members of the Anthropology Society proved equally keen to encourage the flow of indigenous Australian remains into scientific hands. Indeed, one of them, Joseph Barnard Davis, proved by far the most successful collector of racial crania and skeletons of the nineteenth century, amassing just over 1700 specimens by the late 1870s.^[23] What is particularly remarkable about Davis's achievement is that, unlike Huxley or Rolleston but like most of his 'anthropological' colleagues, he was an amateur student of comparative human anatomy. Shortly after completing his medical studies in the late 1820s, Davis settled in the Staffordshire village of Shelton where he worked as a private physician and medical officer until his death in the 1880s. He was a confirmed believer in the immutability of racial characteristics who was especially critical of Huxley's argument (1862) that affinities between the shape of the Neanderthal skull discovered in 1856 and that typical of modern Australian crania suggested strongly that humanity had evolved through monogenetic speciation. The Neanderthal find, Davis argued (1864), was clearly pathological and of relatively modern origin. He wrote of Huxley to John Beddoe (1826-1911), a medical colleague and fellow member of the Anthropological Society: 'He is maddened that I have demolished the first and only foundation stone of human Darwinianism and can't help showing it'.^[24] Even so, Davis was cautious in what he claimed could safely be inferred about human origins from cranial research and never positively affirmed publicly that humanity had arisen from plural origins.

Davis's racial thinking was greatly shaped by an intimate acquaintance with indigenous Australian bodily remains. By his own account, he began collecting and systematically mapping the racial peculiarities of crania in the late 1840s and it seems clear that his intellectual stimulus was the research into racial difference pursued since the early 1830s by the American anatomist Samuel Morton (1799-1851). In Crania Americana (1839), Morton had presented comparative measurements of the shape and internal capacity of some eighty indigenous north and south American skulls, believing that the sum of these cranial measurements 'of more than forty Indian nations' proved beyond dispute that they were a distinct race exhibiting no signs of having originated in Asia. In fact, Morton claimed, the typical form of the indigenous American skull justified the conclusion that racial distinctions were purely the product of physiological processes and that humanity was adapted 'from the beginning' to particular geographical regions (Morton and Combe 1839:3). By the mid-1840s, further research, based in part on 137 skulls procured from ancient Egyptian burial sites, had convinced Morton (1844:66) that humanity was comprised of separately-originating races and that the 'physical or organic characters which distinguish the several races of men, [were] as old as the oldest records of our species'.

At the time of his death in May 1851, Morton had only published detailed comparative measurements of American and Egyptian crania but it was well known in anthropological circles that he envisaged these works as preliminary instalments of a comprehensive base map of human racial diversity. The supposition that Davis saw himself as completing the polygenist Morton's research is strengthened by the fact that from the early 1850s he began energetically seeking the help of colonial administrators and medical practitioners to procure crania of European, Asian, Oceanic, and particularly mainland Australian and Tasmanian origin. As John Beddoe recalled (1910:205), 'Davis's enthusiasm for his subject was wonderful, but sometimes it verged on the ghoulish…. [He] looked on heads simply as potential skulls'.^[25] Davis had no qualms about encouraging the theft of Tasmanian skulls during post-mortems or from graves at the settlements on Flinders Island and Oyster Cove where the survivors of the infamous campaigns of the 1820s were exiled. He informed one correspondent in 1856 (Rae-Ellis 1981:133): 'Were I myself in the colony, I could with very little trouble abstract skulls from dead bodies without defacing them at all, and could instruct any medical gentleman to do this'.

By the late 1860s, Davis had acquired the remarkable number of sixteen Tasmanian crania and the complete skeleton of a thirty year-old Tasmanian man. He bought several skulls at sales but acquired others through contacts with colonial administrators and medical colleagues. They included Joseph Milligan (1807-1884), the superintendent and medical officer of the Flinders Island and Oyster Cove settlements between 1843 and 1855 who had kept Tasmanian remains he came across in the course of his duties. Having retired to England by the early 1860s on a meagre colonial pension, Milligan was well aware of the value placed on bones in metropolitan anatomical circles but was loath to be seen to be trafficking in human remains (Davis 1867a:1). Davis regarded one of the skulls he had bought from Milligan as 'perhaps the finest and most perfect specimen in any Museum. Of great rareity and value'. It was from a Tas­manian man aged about twenty-four who had been killed in 1831 during an attack on a shepherd's hut in the Surrey Hills. Several other specimens Milligan sold Davis bore testimony to the viciousness of frontier conflict in Tasmania, notably the skull of a woman shown to Milligan by a boy of her clan. The boy 'told Milligan that his party some years before had been fired into by a white man when a woman was injured … she had been shot through the eye'.^[26]

Davis's quest for Tasmanian specimens also led him to cultivate the friendship of George Augustus Robinson (1791-1866), Tasmania's first protector of Aborigines, who by the early 1860s had retired to the English spa town of Bath. Over the years, Robinson had acquired a skeleton and at least six crania, two of which were most likely procured during post-mortems at the Aboriginal settlement on Flinders Island.^[27] Not content with the gift of one skull from Robinson, Davis sought to acquire the entire collection after the protector's death in 1866, together with his copious journals — though his plans in this regard were foiled by Robinson's family.^[28]

From 1869, Davis found Tasmanian remains harder to obtain as a result of the infamous affair of the post-mortem mutilation of William Lanne, allegedly the last man of the Tasmanian race. As is well known, Lanne's corpse became the focus of scientific rivalry between the Hobart surgeon William Crowther (1817-1885), who sought to procure the skeleton for the Royal College of Surgeons in London, and leading members of the Royal Society of Tasmania. The mutilation of Lanne's corpse by the competing camps caused widespread public outrage over the willingness of medical authorities to transgress morality and the law in order to secure anatomical specimens, regardless of race (Petrow 1988:20). The scandal meant that few amongst the colony's elite were henceforth prepared to risk public association with the procurement of body parts through dissection or, particularly, the exhumation of graves.

While the Lanne affair greatly restricted both inclination and opportunities to procure Tasmanian remains, Davis was fortunate that one of his Tasmanian correspondents was prepared to risk moral censure for grave-robbing. This was Morton Allport (1830-1878), a Hobart lawyer and prominent member of the Royal Society of Tasmania. Davis appears to have begun corresponding with Allport after the latter sought in 1871 to become a corresponding member of the Anthropological Society and ensured his election by presenting the society with a complete skeleton exhumed in great secrecy from the Aboriginal cemetery on Flinders Island. At about the same time, Davis doubtless also learnt that Allport (1850‑78:9-10) had presented the Royal College of Surgeons with two complete Aboriginal skeletons and had professed his readiness to send a third if the College would give Lanne's skull and vertebrae to the Royal Society of Tasmania. Davis's cultivation of Allport eventually led to his receiving a skull and bones in May 1872 that Allport had taken 'no small trouble to see … were disinterred from a spot where none but other Aborigines were buried'. The following January, Allport (1850-78:107) sent news that he had secured 'a treasure for you in the shape of an adult male Skeleton of Tasmanian native all but absolutely perfect except as to the styloid processes which always seem very fragile'. However, this was to be one of the last skeletons that Allport removed from Flinders Island. As he explained in a letter of May 1874 to Charles Gould, son of the famous ornithologist, he had been approached for skeletal material by Professor Wyville Thompson, then visiting the Australian colonies as naturalist on the Challenger expedition. 'He also wants a specimen from Flinders', Allport confided to Gould, but remains had been discovered when a packing crate of 'geological specimens' was opened and he now feared that the Tasmanian government would move to protect indigenous Tasmanian burial places.^[29]

Davis was to play an influential part in the contest between the 'anthropologicals' and their Darwinian opponents during the 1860s as a consequence of his ruthless pursuit of racially significant non-European skulls and skeletons. His unrivalled collection of Australian and indigenous remains from many other parts of the world proved a valuable resource for generating craniometric evidence that Davis (1864) and other leading 'anthropologicals' deployed against the evolutionary claims of Huxley and other leading Darwinians. The Darwinians responded by dismissing or ignoring the worth of Davis's findings. Even so, they were respectful if not jealous of his success in procuring racially significant remains. And while dismissive of the conclusions that Davis drew from measuring crania, they were equally convinced of the fundamental importance of comparative examination of the bones of ancient and modern 'primitive' peoples in reconstructing the true course of human evolutionary development. In the cause of racial science, Darwinians and 'anthropologicals' were equally willing to disregard the religious and moral sensitivities of their contemporaries and those of the people whose dead they defiled.