Topinard's presentation of the three living Australians and the discussion which followed is a demonstration of how raciology used comparative anatomical measurements as well as judgments about reported manners and customs to assign particular groups of human beings to different rungs on the human racial ladder. Yet when scientists tried to collate all the information available about an indigenous group, in this case Aboriginal Australians, the results did not match their preconceptions. Not only did ethnographic information and physical evidence frequently conflict but evidence from physical features alone could not deliver a clear verdict of racial inferiority. Topinard's response to such tensions was to invoke his two races theory as an umbrella explanation to reconcile the wide range of diverging evidence about what Aborigines were really like.

The comparison between Topinard's presentation and Houzé's report, on the one hand, and Jacques's and Virchow's reports, on the other, exemplifies two opposed perspectives on human difference: physical anthropology and an ethnographic or cultural approach. A particularly harsh variety of physical anthropology was dominant in France for much of the nineteenth century though it was by no means uncontested, as shown in the ambivalent humanist caveats offered by other scientists such as Pruner-Bey and Quatrefages. The encounter between the surviving members of Cunningham's troupe and the scientists of the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris demonstrates clearly that at this period French raciologists denied common humanity to the people they studied, even when they came face to face with them. By treating the Queenslanders anthropometrically as bodies and behaviourally as typical savages, these French anthropologists failed to establish any rapport or any human connection with their subjects — and saw no need to do so. The methodological strictures of an observation-based science excluded feeling, imagination, and intuition. Furthermore, this human failure entailed an epistemological failure. The episode is emblematic of the way in which the brand of anthropology promoted by Broca and Topinard in the early years of the Société was stunted by its raciological premises which foreclosed any prospect of achieving the comprehensive human science to which they aspired.