Topinard's (1879:660) vision of anthropology left little place for ethnography which he defined rather dismissively as 'the description of peoples' and the source of raw material for ethnology. However, by the time of his presentation of the three Australians to the Société, ethnography was receiving more consideration from some of his colleagues. Hamy, who had first learned of the group's presence in Paris and had visited them with Topinard at the Jardin d'Acclimatation, was at the forefront of this shifting emphasis. Three years earlier he had founded the Revue d'Ethnographie and in his introduction (1882:ii) had lamented the neglect of ethnography at a time when 'The white races, in their movement of expansion across the earth, saw the indigenous races of the newly occupied countries disappear in their wake almost everywhere'.

Hamy's career began in 1864 as an intern for Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) (whose demonstrations of his psychiatric patients Sigmund Freud famously attended) at the Salpêtrière psychiatric hospital in Paris. There he met Broca and went to work in his anthropological laboratory as his student and assistant. Hamy held various positions in the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, succeeding the prominent defender of monogenism in France, Armand de Quatrefages (1810-1892), in the Chair of Anthropology in 1892. His greatest achievement was the ultimate success of his efforts to establish France's first ethnographic museum, the Musée du Trocadéro (the modern Musée de l'Homme), which opened in Paris in 1880.^[30]

Hamy (1891) made an invaluable contribution to the history and ethnography of Aboriginal Australians, especially Tasmanians, through his pursuit of lost artwork from Baudin's voyage, a portfolio of drawings by Nicolas-Martin Petit.^[31] However, Hamy's historical and ethnographic sense, which might have led him out of the racialist assumptions of his training, did not translate into cultural sensitivity, at least in his writings. In this, he differed from his mentor Quatrefages (1988) who later in his career had drawn on Bonwick's works to write in humanistic terms about the moral worth and vanquished rights of the Tasmanians. Hamy's commitment to a social evolutionary schema that classified human groups into higher and lower races meant that his sociocultural focus rested no less on hierarchical assumptions than did the craniometry of Broca or Topinard. For example, in an early article in the Bulletins de la Société d'Anthropologie de Paris (1872:622), he wrote that the 'negritos', while occupying 'a very low position in the scale of human races', were not yet 'the last of men' — the Australians had that distinction by virtue of their level of material progress.

Hamy made only a very limited contribution to the discussion following Topinard's presentation. He confined himself to some remarks about practices of scarification and a brief appraisal of the memoir by Houzé and Jacques: 'if the anthropological conclusions of the first of these colleagues leave something to be desired, at least the ethnographic and linguistic part is treated with the greatest precision' (Topinard 1885:693). Indeed, the memoir in question shows a marked lack of fit between Houzé's extreme polygenism and, for the time, Jacques's relatively detailed, sensitive ethnographic and linguistic reporting and analysis (Houzé and Jacques 1884-5). This disjunction no doubt resulted from the separation of physical anthropology from ethnography, the first tackled by Houzé and the second by Jacques.