Houzé's polygenism was of the order of Broca's. He used the word 'pithecoid', ape-like, to describe a whole range of Aboriginal physical characteristics from the head to the foot,[32] concluding, with specific reference to Cunningham's troupe of Queenslanders, that:
we are justified in retaining the epithet of inferior for any human race that presents, in the way it is organized, in the proportions of its limbs, a large number of features that are found in monkeys; these features, attenuated by crossings and by evolution, appear as atavistic reminders (Houzé and Jacques 1884-5:92).
Houzé made much of Darwin's pronouncement in The Descent of Man concerning the relative atavism of male and female forms (Houzé and Jacques 1884-5:92). In this respect, the final conclusion to his report is reminiscent of Topinard's stereotyping conflation of sexual and racial prejudices to malign not only Aboriginal Australians but women generally:
we shall emphasise again the fact that woman presents many more atavistic features than man, just as much in the white [race] as in the Australian. Woman has remained true to the primitive type; she is the guardian of hereditary features, she is basically conservative; in her skeleton as in her moral aspects, she belongs to the past, while man is progressive; in his [physical] organization he is more distant from the base-type; in his mental faculties he belongs to the future.[33]
Jacques's contribution to the memoir takes us into quite different territory from his colleague's. It also contrasts favourably with the feeble ethnographic efforts of the members of the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris and the scant information they obtained from the remnants of Cunningham's troupe. The circumstances whereby most members of the group successively succumbed to fatal illnesses meant that the Belgians had some advantage over the French since seven of the original nine were still alive when they reached Brussels. However, in retrospect, Jacques's comments about Toby's lack of animation spoke to the state of health that ended with his death in a Paris hospital. The Belgians had decided to vaccinate the seven Aborigines against smallpox owing to an outbreak of the disease in Brussels but most suffered a severe reaction (Houzé and Jacques 1884‑5:63). The doctors no doubt acted with the best intentions but it is likely that, uprooted, debilitated, and suffering from the Northern cold, the Australians were further weakened by the reaction.
The contrast between Jacques's study and Topinard's presentation and the subsequent discussion highlights the inherent conflict between the perspectives of the physical anthropologists and those more interested in the cultural dimensions of human groups. Anthropology's brief was to bring within its purview everything relating to the study of man, in nature and in the world. Its domain was both the natural history of man and the study of past and present human groups in their geographical distribution and all the diversity of their languages, 'manners and customs', and material cultures. However, Broca, Topinard, Houzé, and their like, whose first interest was man in nature, had no sense of their discipline as humanistic. Indeed, their conception of the anthropological enterprise expressly precluded humanism, as Houzé made clear in relation to Australia:
The authors who have described the different Australian tribes are often in disagreement, even for identical localities; we are not at all surprised by these differing opinions, because we know how difficult it is to describe and especially to observe, and how it is necessary to resist the deceptive impulses of our illusions. Art and feeling have not to intervene in anatomical research, and we almost always take the wrong direction when they guide us in our observations, what is necessary in this research is the arid and brutal truth (Houzé and Jacques 1884-5:53-4).
By contrast, a humanistic anthropology is one in which the subject becomes 'the object of observation for himself', as Franz Pruner-Bey (1808-1882), a former president of the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris, put it in his inaugural address, appealing to the Socratic dictum 'Know thyself'.[34] Such an anthropology would accept that other human beings were fully human which was precisely what polygenism called into question.
[32] For Houzé's summary of supposedly atavistic or simian characteristics in his subjects, see Houzé and Jacques 1884-5:92-4.
[33] Houzé and Jacques 1884-5:94; see also Topinard 1872:252.
[34] Pruner-Bey 1865a:4. Pruner-Bey was one member of the Société who defended non-European groups, particularly Aboriginal Australians (see especially 1860:481-9). He deserves a prominent place in the story of such defenders because of his sensitivity to culture and language and his awareness of the problems involved in knowing and speaking about another culture, having himself spent many years in Egypt.