By the early 1880s, Darwinian evolutionary theory had become scientific orthodoxy in British anthropological circles. On his death in 1881, Davis received faint praise from evolutionist critics for his tenacity as a collector and for donating his wealth of specimens to the Royal College of Surgeons. In contrast, his Darwinian rival George Rolleston, who died less than a month later and had also examined large numbers of crania using much the same metrical techniques as Davis, was feted as Britain's leading craniologist. The failure of the static, polygenist ideas of the 'anthropologicals' owed much to the lack of explanatory power their interpretation of the meanings of race were deemed to have in comparison to those of the Darwinians. Moreover, while at its height in the mid-1860s the Anthropological Society boasted over 700 members, it was only a small inner circle within the society that actively propagated static racialism. These men were largely amateur researchers like Davis who worked outside the professional scientific establishment of mid-Victorian Britain. In contrast, many leading Darwinians enjoyed positions and rising influence within universities and the medical establishment. They had many more opportunities to convince professional colleagues and students of the validity of their ideas. Furthermore, the Darwinian conceptualization of the demise of indigenous people as a natural process rather than the outcome of human agency in the form of inter-racial conflict was culturally and morally a far more attractive vision of human natural history.

I have shown in this chapter that the contest between the Darwinians and their 'anthropological' opponents put indigenous Australian bones at the heart of a disturbing practical juncture between long-standing colonial assumptions about the inevitable extinction of 'inferior' races and the divergent logic of opposed branches of the science of race. The apparent correspondence of theory and experience had sinister consequences. It not only stimulated the plunder of Aboriginal burial places and scientific trafficking in bodily remains but strengthened white perceptions that the Aboriginal body itself proved the reality of profound and insurmountable biological differences between indigenous Australians and colonial settlers. This entanglement of metropolitan intellectual controversies with colonial experience, phobias, and actions firmly established race as the dominant cognitive foundation for envisaging and managing the destiny of Aboriginal Australians.