Specimens for the “science of man”: Skulls,race,and instructions in James Prichard’s Enlightenment ethnology

Abstract

In this article we explain why a tradition of instructions issued for the proper conduct of natural history and founded in the eighteenth century became such an influential source for pervasive notions of race in the nineteenth century. In particular, we locate the transnational influence of this tradition in the work of James Cowles Prichard (1786–1848) between his time as a student of medicine at the University of Edinburgh and the posthumous publication of his own instructions for “ethnology” in John Herschel’s A Manual of Scientific Enquiry in 1849. By locating Prichard in this intellectual context, we connect the transnational Enlightenment tradition of instructing natural history travel (section one), to the practice of collecting both artifacts and human remains (section two), and the role of both ideas and collected items that transformed people into specimens by the turn of the century (section three). We argue that this little-known but profoundly influential pan-European tradition of instructed natural history activated a set of ideas and knowledge practices in a wide range of colonial settings, regularly marked by violence and enslavement, that transformed human beings into specimens to be compiled in quest of a science of race.

Introduction

In writing his chapter on “Ethnology” for John Herschel’s widely circulated A Manual of Scientific Enquiry; Prepared for the Use of Officers in Her Majesty’s Navy and Travellers in General of 1849, James Cowles Prichard (1786–1848) instructed his readers to: “bring . . . home a collection of skulls,” carefully selected as “specimens which afford the best idea of the prevailing form of the head” of all the “tribes or races” among the “human family.” ¹ These instructions were the last of Prichard’s works, published posthumously and edited by his son. They were a kind of culmination of his career spent establishing the scientific credentials of ethnology or physical anthropology. Prichard was lauded by his peers for having “done more than any other single individual to place ethnology on a scientific basis,” by condensing and integrating “all the most important information that can be collected . . . illustrative of the present condition and past history of the races of mankind.” ² Yet Prichard’s instructions were a culmination in another sense, of a tradition of instructing natural historians traveling to distant locations on how to locate and “procure” a “collection” of “specimens,” that “serve to identify every leading variety” among the races of mankind. ³ We argue here that this neglected tradition of instructed natural history travel illustrates not only how the colonial collection of human remains contributed to the consolidation of scientific knowledge but also transformed human subjects into specimens of race.

By the time Prichard wrote his chapter toward the middle of the nineteenth century, this tradition of instructed natural history was over a century old. Prichard had already helped to consolidate it in the early 1840s by collaborating with the Quaker, physician, and cofounder of the Aborigines’ Protection Society, Thomas Hodgkin (1798–1866), and Charles Darwin (1809–82), then only a few years returned from his epochal voyage on The Beagle, on a set of queries for “travellers” able to “procure information” on “the different races of men,” especially those “in an uncivilized state.” ⁴ That tradition of studying humanity by instructions issued to traveling natural historians was founded very firmly on precedents and exemplars from the era of Europe’s Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. It defined the twin tasks that traveling natural historians must surmount as accurately observing the variety of humanity in their specific locations, and systematically collecting artifacts illustrative of “human variety.” ⁵ Though these earlier instructions were not defined as contributions to the “scientific” disciplines of ethnology or anthropology, they shared with Prichard’s a conviction that the races of humankind could be known by both social and cultural practices (such as languages and customs), and by the physical shape and appearance of bodies (notably complexion and crania). Prichard had been educated in this tradition by studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh in the years when race began to consolidate on the firm foundation of Scottish Enlightenment thought. ⁶

Prichard thus embodied a central tension in Enlightenment thought between the idea of humanity as a single species defined by universal aptitudes, and the emerging conviction (posing no apparent contradiction) that humans were subdivided into distinct races with different capabilities. ⁷ The instructions he issued activated that tension in eighteenth century thought, made it globally mobile, and consolidated the credibility of race science in the nineteenth century. This consolidation of race was reflected in a gradual shift away from earlier explanations for the varieties of humanity by climatic forces (such as relentless heat or severe cold) that could be modified by human action, toward an increasing emphasis on more invariable characteristics of racial difference. ⁸ Prichard had learned to cite and amplify the observations and arguments of the leading exponents of Scottish and European Enlightenment thought, as well as to systematize and exemplify their methods. ⁹ As notions of race began to achieve predominance in the early nineteenth century, Prichard came to prioritize, among all the expressions of human variety, a single measure and specimen of it: skulls.

As Brooke Penaloza-Patzak and Tamara Fernando argue in this special issue, the history of race was tied to the economic ambitions and violence of colonial resource extraction. ¹⁰ The collection of human remains exemplifies that connection. By means of imperial conquests in the New World, skulls became incontrovertible data from the dead. Their disembodiment made them into rootless artifacts of knowledge. In the late seventeenth century, for instance, bodies of the Inca dead were used to establish the legal credentials of colonial rule; by the late eighteenth century their skulls were appropriated to catalogue racial variety and the variable stages of American ‘savagery’ or ‘civilization’. ¹¹ By the early nineteenth century skulls assumed scientific significance as artifacts of racial difference brokered and traded through extensive global networks of natural historians, anatomists, and amateur collectors. ¹² The colonial dead were “looted, decapitated, dissected, and dispersed” to supply this international trade in skulls, the prized scientific commodities of colonial violence. ¹³

In this article, we will explain why a tradition of instructing traveling natural historians, founded in the eighteenth century, became such an influential source for pervasive notions of race in the nineteenth century. Prichard is the key figure in our analysis. It was his education in medicine at the University of Edinburgh that enabled him to formulate and express the amalgamation of sources, concepts, methods, and arguments that he would go on to amplify in his Researches into the Physical History of Man, first as one volume in 1813 and subsequently expanded to five volumes between 1836 and 1847. Prichard’s educational context placed him at the intellectual epicenter of Scotland’s Enlightenment. Here, Prichard imbibed what David Hume (1711–76) famously named the Scottish “science of man”: a systematic study of the “powers and faculties” of “men” as they exist in the world, not by means of a single line of inquiry but drawing on “all the sciences” for the “improvement” of “human understanding.” ¹⁴ Prichard not only studied the sources of that science of man, he came into contact with influential exponents of it in the teaching of Edinburgh’s professors of moral philosophy and natural history, Dugald Stewart (1753–1828) and Robert Jameson (1774–1854) respectively.

By locating Prichard in this intellectual context, we are able to connect the transnational Enlightenment tradition of instructing natural history travel (section one), to the practice of collecting both artifacts and human remains (section two), and the role of both ideas and collected items that transformed people into specimens by the turn of the century (section three). This little-known but profoundly influential pan-European tradition of instructed natural history travel activated a set of ideas and knowledge practices in the history of science, mobilizing them in a wide range of colonial settings regularly marked by violence and enslavement. ¹⁵ We argue that Prichard’s instructions and his focus on classifying racial variety were not merely products of the increasing specialization of science in the nineteenth century, but the culmination of his educational background in Scottish Enlightenment thought.

Instructing natural history

In the seventeenth century, European intellectuals began issuing instructions to those resident in, or traveling to, colonial domains beyond Europe’s shores. The aim of these instructions was to compile inventories of natural history, including the collection of interesting or curious items such as animals, plants, minerals, or human artifacts in order to catalogue God’s creation, and to exploit the resources of nature. ¹⁶ A constant source of doubt arising from this practice concerned the extent to which those instructed could be relied upon to find the most accurate information without embellishing it with their own or their informants’ views. As a consequence, the drafting of instructions became a means not only to acquire useful knowledge and curious artifacts and specimens, but to prescribe the proper conduct of scientific inquiry. ¹⁷ The drafting and issuing of instructions became a “new genre” of writing and knowledge-formation that aimed to “teach Europeans how to see the world.” ¹⁸ Drawn up under the auspices of Britain’s Royal Society, Robert Boyle’s (1627–91) instructions sought to accomplish precisely that. His “General Heads for a Natural History of a Country” specified that his collectors in the colonies must organize their observations in systematic categories, which could then be used by metropolitan savants and scientists to compile “a good Natural History” exemplifying “Solid and Useful Philosophy.” ¹⁹ Boyle’s instructions were intentionally utilitarian in urging “Inquisitive and curious” colonists and other travelers to conduct “their searches of matters” for the “improvement of True Philosophy, and the wellfare of Mankind.” ²⁰

The idea that travel could be used to advance the utilitarian and humanitarian purposes of natural history motivated the drafting of instructions for further voyages throughout the era of Enlightenment. ²¹ In his inaugural lecture at Uppsala University in 1741, Carl Linnaeus (1707–78) emphasized the importance of natural historians conducting domestic expeditions to European hinterlands, as he had done in traveling to Sweden’s far northern colonial domain of “Lapland” (today referred to as Sápmi) in 1732. ²² Linnaeus also issued further instructions to travelers going overseas in his Instructio Peregrinatoris (Instructions for Travelling Natural Historians) of 1759. Here he emphasized the need for meticulous observation, rigorous note-taking, and an eye for “useful” knowledge (such as medicines and foods) that could be obtained from resident peoples, whether they were, in his words, “commoners” or “learned men.” ²³ Linnaeus’s instructions became a model for subsequent natural history expeditions, an influence further consolidated by the domestic and global travels of many of his former students, whose journeys he was instrumental in organizing. ²⁴ Crucially, Linnaeus’s instructions and his students’ voyages were not merely exercises in gathering knowledge about plants and humanity, but also in performing the role of the traveling natural historian. ²⁵ Properly instructed, the traveling natural historian was both a gatherer of information and specimens from diverse sources and interlocutors, and an arbiter of the reliability of the knowledge to be derived by cross-checking testimony with observation, and the works of existing authorities. ²⁶

In the second half of the eighteenth century the practice of issuing instructions for natural history became the “primary instrument” for directing a systematic “interrogation of nature in its totality.” ²⁷ In France in particular, these instructions became ever more prescriptive, as typified, for instance, by the 39 “mémoires . . . d’instruction aux savants” provided to Bougainville’s Pacific expedition of 1766, covering geography, geology, and natural history. ²⁸

Existing scholarship on subsequent scientific instructions has emphasized five predominant features. The first of these was that all instructions were intended to serve a useful purpose in making the compilation of accurate and verifiable information possible. ²⁹ While the standard of utility being served could be rather differently construed, as either personal, national, or for the whole of humanity, the second predominating feature of instructions was that they were a replicable technique for guiding the traveler, usually uneducated in the techniques of natural history, on how to observe “in the field” in order to advance knowledge. ³⁰ That knowledge, as Patrick Anthony has argued in this special issue, often reflected the economic, religious, or social imperatives of those doing the collecting. ³¹ Hence the third feature of Enlightenment instructions was that they were attempts to exercise greater control over the collection and collation of knowledge in the field by serving as a form of discipline in “la formation du voyageur,” training the traveler in how to practice natural history in the field. ³² Whatever their utility in training in the field, the fourth feature of the history of Enlightenment instructions was that their drafting reflected the disciplinary consolidation of knowledge over the last decades of the eighteenth century. “[S]avants sédentaires” in Europe invested “observateurs au travail” with greater intellectual authority to become arbiters of economic, medical, meteorological, or anthropological knowledge. ³³ This consolidation of knowledge and techniques took place against the backdrop of unfolding colonization across the globe, which fueled the ambition for successive instructions to help achieve a “total knowledge” of nature, and “man” or humanity in particular. ³⁴ As the century progressed, the fifth and final feature of natural history instructions was reflected in a significant narrowing from their initial function to document the social and physical features of “human variety,” toward a greater emphasis on correctly identifying and cataloguing the races of humankind.

By 1785, when the voluminous French instructions (over 250 pages) were issued to la Pérouse’s ill-fated voyage to the Pacific, race was beginning to assume greater taxonomic significance. ³⁵ Douglas contends that these instructions marked a crucial transition from an earlier Buffonian emphasis on comparing different human groups in order to classify the varieties of humankind, toward an anatomical search for the racial features of each human population. ³⁶ This development was also exemplified by the eighteen additional “mémoires” of instructions (in addition to the reissue of those given to la Pérouse) provided for the d’Entrecasteaux voyage in 1791. ³⁷ Among them was one on zoology by the physician, zoologist, and pioneer of psychiatry Philippe Pinel (1745–1826), which explicitly rejected Buffon’s classification of “variétés de l’espece humaine,” recommending instead particular attention be paid to the “structure mecanique” of bodies, especially the maxillary and lower jaw bones of the skull. ³⁸ In addition to this narrowing on a physically determined race, instructions issued to successive expeditions emphasized the need for collecting and cataloguing human variety, alongside other specimens of nature. ³⁹ Collecting specimens served to substantiate race as a visible scientific category. This was the purpose of the “specimen,” which Johnson’s Dictionary helpfully defined in 1755 as a “sample; a part of any thing exhibited that the rest may be known.” ⁴⁰

The twinned methods of classification and collection embodied in the scientific instructions, issued to d’Entrecasteaux in 1791 and Baudin in 1800, consolidated the preeminent role of anatomy and medicine in coordinating the investigation, collection, and display of human races. ⁴¹ Nicolas Baudin’s voyage, in particular, was the product of what Chappey calls a “vaste enquête” into the nature of man aimed at advancing a comprehensive knowledge of human health, anatomy, history, psychology, social forms, and behavior. ⁴² The name given to this comprehensive knowledge, “anthropology,” was formalized in Joseph Marie Dé Gerando’s (1772–1842) book of instruction Considerations sur les methodes a suivre dans l’observastion des peuples sauvages of 1800. ⁴³ For Dé Gerando, the purpose of studying ‘savage’ peoples was to use such knowledge as a point of comparison with those considered more ‘civilized’. ⁴⁴ The aim of the instructions issued to Captain Baudin by the Secretary of the newly formed Société des observateurs de l’homme, L. F. Jauffret (1770–1840), was to amass reliable data that could only be properly organized and arranged by the sedentary savants back in Paris. ⁴⁵ To this end, living specimens were requested, but they were also expected to collect other data. ⁴⁶

The French naturalist Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) supplied the Baudin expedition with “An instructive note on the research to be made concerning the anatomical differences of the various races of men,” dated 1799. ⁴⁷ Just as Dé Gerando’s anthropological instructions aimed at procuring an exact understanding of ‘savage’ humanity, so Cuvier’s instructions were concerned with forming a definite identification of the different ‘races’ of humanity. Cuvier echoed Jauffret’s desire for living specimens, but also instructed the expedition’s artists to provide exact portraits showing both the frontal aspect of the face as well as in profile, precisely measured. In addition to the production of scientific portraits, Cuvier requested the collection of physical specimens, most importantly skulls. This had also been emphasized in Pinel’s instructions for the d’Entrecasteaux voyage in 1791, recommending “des collections des parties osseuses de la tête autant qu’on pourra s’en procurer.” ⁴⁸ In his 1799 instructions, Cuvier wrote that: “travellers should not neglect any opportunity when they can visit the places where the dead are laid to rest” in order to take and catalogue skulls. ⁴⁹ “Whole skeletons would be infinitely precious” because no scholar had yet been able to write “a detailed comparison of the skeleton of the Negro and that of the White.”

According to Gascoigne, the notable volume of instructions issued to French scientific voyages after 1750 exemplified a narrowing focus on race along with “growing doubts” that human racial differences were directly caused by climatic forces such as exposure to tropical sun, desert heat, or Arctic cold. This resulted in a greater emphasis on what were presumed to be the “anatomical or biological” features of race in and on human bodies. ⁵⁰ During the last decade of the eighteenth century this narrowing focus on race in natural history instructions culminated in racial typologies based on cranial measurements, such as that proposed by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840). ⁵¹ The practice of cranial collection brings to the fore the crucial connection between natural history instructions and colonization. ⁵² Blumenbach actively cultivated connections that brought him into colonial networks of skull collectors, leading for instance to the supply of “good specimens” of Carib skulls from the Caribbean island of St. Vincent that were promised to him by Sir Joseph Banks (1743–1820) in 1787. ⁵³ It is vital, therefore, to understand instructions not simply as contributions to the extension of Enlightenment knowledge, but as Kury suggests, instruments for the pursuit of colonization. ⁵⁴ Instructions transformed humanity into an object of colonial study, in which knowledge and profit were inextricably bound together (as we shall see below). This knowledge was to be pursued not just by collecting information, but also artifacts and body parts. These were used as specimens of race to teach the science of man in anatomy theaters, medical classrooms, and in museums, such as that of the University of Edinburgh. ⁵⁵

Edinburgh’s science of man

The University of Edinburgh’s museum was one of Britain’s first, and became one of the largest natural history collections in Europe in the late eighteenth century. From 1767 onwards the university’s professorship in natural history carried with it the appointment as Regius Keeper of the museum. ⁵⁶ In the period before designated anthropology museums, university museums such as Edinburgh’s were at the forefront of integrating both the pedagogical and public display of human variety. ⁵⁷ By accessing Edinburgh’s natural history museum, visitors were presented with objects such as clothing and weapons from diverse communities across the globe as “objects of evidence” of alleged human savagery and racial distinction. ⁵⁸ As Raphael Uchôa’s contribution to this issue illustrates, the collection and display of artifacts produced by Indigenous or First Nations peoples transformed them into specimens of natural history, interpreted and catalogued in European orders of knowledge alongside animals, minerals, and plants. ⁵⁹

While imperial expansion was a driver of increasing object accumulation, another key factor was material decay due to imperfect preservation or the infestation of moths. ⁶⁰ The museum collection therefore required constant refurbishment. Continual donations from former students and other collectors in a variety of colonial settings helped meet this need. When the botanist and disciple of the Linnaean system of taxonomy John Walker (1731–1803) became professor of natural history and Regius Keeper in 1779, he taught his students that if they wanted to become “proficient in Natural History” each must be “employed in collecting the natural subjects of it.” ⁶¹ Walker’s own pedagogy included collecting and exhibiting the material world in all its variety. His own collecting practice exemplified the mixing of different fields of knowledge (Swedish and French natural history, medicine, history, botany, and moral philosophy). ⁶² Too many of the people who “settled in different parts of the world,” Walker complained, did not know how to collect and preserve specimens properly. He promised his students that he would “make it my business to give you a set of instructions for collecting and preserving the productions of nature.” ⁶³ In 1793, he did just that by composing his own instructions for collecting in India, telling each collector to “mark down as many particulars respecting the natural history as you can learn, and the uses that are made of them in economy or arts.” ⁶⁴

Around the same time Walker was drafting his instructions, the university’s professor of moral philosophy, Dugald Stewart (1753–1828), taught “conjectural history” in his influential lectures of 1789/90, which he elaborated in his widely read “Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith” of 1793. ⁶⁵ A former student of Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), the previous incumbent in the chair, Stewart was also influenced by Walker’s teaching of natural history. As Stewart saw it, the method of “conjectural history” was for the “Philosopher” to amass empirical data on humanity from ancient sources as well as contemporary travelers’ observations of “man in a Savage State.” From the empirical facts extracted from these sources the “Philosopher” must piece together the most probable account of ‘savage’ humanity, supplying the vast “chasms” of knowledge inevitably remaining by logical “conjecture & such kind of writing may be called conjectural history.” ⁶⁶

One of the chief conjectures that preoccupied Stewart was to explain why universally shared human aptitudes were differentially expressed by the variety of nations and races across human history and in his own day. ⁶⁷ A key part of the explanation lay in the adoption of Scottish stadial history, first articulated by Adam Smith (1723–90) but later developed and amplified by others such as Stewart. Stadial history was based on the proposition that the human species was endowed with a universal capacity to progress (as individuals and in groups) over the course of time along a pathway from supposedly nomadic hunting (which the Scots denominated as ‘savagery’), toward settled societies based on commercial economies and an advanced division of labor (a condition described as ‘civilization’). ⁶⁸ As Ferguson and then Stewart presented this framework in their lectures on moral philosophy, the historical distinction between tribes and nations became entwined with notions of racial variety drawn from the work of natural historians. For Stewart, the Scottish contribution to knowledge lay precisely in providing a natural history of humanity that drew equally on philosophers and historians as well as the contributions of “philosophical travellers” who journeyed to colonial domains and whose work provided impetus for logical inference or informed conjecture. ⁶⁹ Herein lay the reason why Scottish thought came to be distinguished by an interchangeable framework of natural history and moral philosophy that integrated empirical observation with conjecture and speculation about the racial varieties of humankind.

In this context, Walker’s teaching of natural history and his superintendence of the museum made significant contributions to the science of man at the University of Edinburgh. In seeking to revive the museum as a tool for teaching students and the wider public, Walker also sought to use it to boost his own and the university’s prestige. ⁷⁰ Walker’s former students were a crucial part of his collecting network, but he was open to contact with anyone who could provide valuable specimens of nature and humanity. ⁷¹ In 1794 Walker became a fellow of the Royal Society of London, presided over by Joseph Banks, who gave him access to further colonial networks of specimen collectors. ⁷² In Scotland, Walker was a cofounder and secretary of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the statutes of which required that donations were placed in the university’s museum. ⁷³

In the last few years of his life, Walker’s lectures and stewardship of the museum were taken over by his former student, Robert Jameson. Jameson oversaw the spectacular expansion of the museum after his succession as Keeper in 1804, with its collection growing to 74,000 items (many of which are still in the National Museum of Scotland). As part of his effort to extend his collection, Jameson drew up his own instructions, and translated those from French naturalists for publication in Britain. Jameson claimed that it was as a result of the circulation of these instructions (in particular via the Admiralty) that his collections increased so rapidly. ⁷⁴ In 1817 Jameson published his “Set of Instructions for Collectors” in the Edinburgh Magazine. ⁷⁵ These instructions had a strong ethnographic dimension that situated human history within the remit of the duly instructed collector and natural historian:

Antiquities, Articles of Dress, Agricultural, Hunting, and Warlike Instruments, &c. of different Nations and Tribes.—The collecting of the various articles just enumerated, is particularly recommended, as these objects illustrate, in a very interesting manner, the past and present condition of the human species. ⁷⁶

Jameson mixed terminology that drew upon Scottish conjectural history and European natural history, referring to a unified human “species” differentiated into “nations” and “tribes” exemplifying different levels of historical advance characterized by “agriculture” or “hunting.” In referring to the collection of human skulls in particular, Jameson made explicit mention of “race”:

Skeletons.—Collectors ought not to neglect to preserve the skeletons of the different species of animals. Of man, the skull is the most interesting part, as it varies in the different races of the human species, and is also frequently singularly altered by the practices of savage tribes. ⁷⁷

Here was an echo of the Enlightenment in reference to the plastic shaping of varietal characteristics, yet the term “races” carried a different connotation. In later instructions, Jameson requested crania of specific peoples: “Malays, Papuans, Negroes, and of lower animals,” suggesting a racial typology that associated some human groups with “lower animals.” ⁷⁸

Jameson took the tradition of instructed natural history he had inherited from Walker, and the science of man integral to Scottish moral philosophy, and transformed it into an incipient anatomical science of man in the education of students at the University. The mania to acquire skulls soon rendered them scientific trophies, prized as symbols of a human past that Europeans considered themselves to have advanced far beyond. In the process, collected skulls became the keys to a radical epistemic transformation by which human populations around the world were reduced to specimens of race. ⁷⁹ This transformation involved the physical work of theft carried out on various colonial battlefield and massacre sites, burial places, and hospitals where collectors accumulated skulls for donation to the university and museum. The labeling of artifacts and remains in ledgers, catalogues, and tables, the carrying of crania to lecture halls, their display to students and museum audiences, as well as scientific societies all contributed to this transformation. The integration of instruction, collection, skulls, and race was communicated to wide audiences not only in Jameson’s instructions, but in the work of his former students, few having greater notoriety than Samuel George Morton (1799–1851). Morton built up an immense personal collection of around one thousand skulls, and authored the Crania Americana (1839). ⁸⁰ Other graduate collectors of crania included Thomas Makdougall Brisbane (1773–1860), who, after a successful military career served as the Governor of New South Wales from 1821 to 1825. Brisbane sent a number of skulls of Indigenous Australians to the museum alongside other natural history specimens. ⁸¹

The utility of skull collections for the era’s natural historians was thought to consist, Pietro Corsi argues, in the more rigorous, neutral, and precise data to be obtained from their measurement than from the examination of skin color or hair texture. ⁸² Skulls were also popular specimens because they did not decompose, and were relatively easy to prepare for transportation to museums. Jameson provided advice on this in his 1817 instructions:

The best way of cleaning bones, is to expose them to the air, and allow the insects to eat off the flesh. This being done, they ought to be washed with sea water, and afterwards freely exposed to the sun. The best skulls are obtained by putting the whole head in rum or whisky, or a strong solution of alum; both male and female heads ought if possible to be preserved. ⁸³

By methods such as these, Edinburgh’s university museum and others across Europe and America, became repositories for numerous human remains used to classify races and teach racial science. ⁸⁴

In his lectures of 1813/14, Jameson subscribed to Blumenbach’s racial taxonomy: Caucasian, Mongol, American, Malay, Ethiopian, as well as his supposition that humankind originated from “Caucasia.” In this, Blumenbach followed Christoph Meiners’s Outline of the History of Mankind (1785) in which he amplified the Enlightenment fantasy of the highest standard of human physical beauty originating in the regions of Georgia or Circassia adjacent to the Black Sea. ⁸⁵ By the early 1820s however, Jameson was using an alternative racial typology of four races: “I Negro Race,” “II Mongol Race,” “III The American Race,” and “IV The European Race.” These were further subdivided into more categories: eleven within the “European race” alone, and five within the “Mongol race,” four among the “Negro race,” while only the “American race” remained monolithic. Jameson downplayed the operative role of climate in determining racial characteristics, and paid greater heed to supposed differences in the stature and strength of each race. ⁸⁶ Despite his rather idiosyncratic racial typology it is clear that in each of the sets of lecture notes we have from his course in natural history of 1813/14 and the early 1820s that Jameson operated with a notion that race was heritable. In this Jameson clearly shared much in common with one of his most illustrious former students, James Cowles Prichard. In his dissertation presented to the Royal Medical Society in 1808 Prichard proposed that there was an “established law prevailing throughout the animal kingdom,” that each generation of a species differed in form and complexion as a matter of “hereditary” variation, not incidental causation. ⁸⁷ In 1813 Prichard published the expanded version of his student dissertation from Edinburgh as the Researches into the Physical History of Man. In subsequent years Prichard’s Researches featured among the texts Jameson recommended to students. ⁸⁸

Enlightenment to ethnology

Raised a Quaker, Prichard’s entry to Edinburgh University to study medicine exemplified the institution’s doctrinal openness. His subsequent career reflected the mix of sources and conjectures that constituted the Scottish science of man he imbibed there. Throughout his life he maintained a Christian conviction in the essential unity of the human species, but coupled this with a scientific quest to map evident racial differences whose deep past and possible futures led to other works on philology and psychiatry, membership of the Aborigines’ Protection Society, and presidency of the Ethnological Society. ⁸⁹ That eclecticism was on display in his student dissertation of 1808, which drew on a wide variety of sources including colonial travel literature (Forster, Cook, Park, and Sparrman among others), and Enlightenment natural historians (such as Buffon, Pallas, and Blumenbach). He sifted through all of them for empirical data, comparing one piece of evidence with another to make logical inferences about peoples he described as races. ⁹⁰ These races were distinguished by inherited features (complexion, hair, and stature, though he notably excluded discussion of skulls from this early work), which he inferred were not produced by climatic or other incidental causes. Here too, Prichard expressed his firm commitment to the unity of the human species, notwithstanding his division of humanity into races. ⁹¹ Yet there was another crucial distinction operating in Prichard’s view of humanity in his student dissertation that he elaborated in the subsequent publication and editions of Researches. This was reflected in his adoption of the conjectural method of stadial history with which he became acquainted through Dugald Stewart’s lectures on moral philosophy. Stadial history differentiated between peoples considered more civilized (Europeans and their colonial descendants) and others deemed less so. This distinction, Prichard believed, was an operative dimension in the racial variety of the human species.

“Civilized life holds the same relation to the condition of savages in the human race” Prichard wrote in 1813, that “the domesticated state holds to the natural or wild condition among the inferior animals.” ⁹² This was a view that Prichard had previously and confidently asserted in his student dissertation. ⁹³ Being much more complicated than animal domestication, Prichard argued therein, civilization would have comparatively greater effects on the human form. As a consequence, Prichard incorporated a stadial distinction between the civilized and “savage state of life” into his racial methodology. ⁹⁴ Determining the relative effects of the historical process of civilization on the various races of humanity required a comparison of like with like. Hence it was necessary to “compare savages with other barbarous tribes, and civilized races with people in a similar state . . . as nearly as possible on a level with each other in a moral point of view.” ⁹⁵ In support of his contention that civilization shaped the outward racial morphology of human beings, Prichard cited Stanhope Smith’s (1751–1819) argument that the “field slaves” in America preserved their “rude” “African” manners, whereas the “domestic servants” who worked in close proximity to their white “masters” began to look similar to the “lower class of white people” with more “refined” and “agreeable” features. ⁹⁶ This purported civilizational effect on physical forms Prichard and Stanhope Smith alike explained by reference to the supposed “lenity” of treatment of “domestic slaves,” and their proximity to the aspirational comforts and refinements of supposedly ‘civilized’ life. Neither made reference to the actual cause of intergenerational physical changes: the generations of sexual assault and forced pregnancies that were an invariable consequence of slavery.

Prichard affirmed a hierarchical understanding of race in which civilization was inevitably associated with whiteness, while darkness and black skin became an indication of primitivity. The “dark races,” Prichard wrote, were “best adapted by their [bodily] organisation to the condition of rude and uncivilized nations . . . the primitive state of mankind” while “European” bodies were “best fitted for the habits of improved life.” ⁹⁷ Prichard’s argument was not a new formulation, but a more succinct and definitive statement of ideas that had circulated within the Scottish science of man and among generations of former Edinburgh students. ⁹⁸ By explicitly linking racial hierarchy to complexion and to the designation of “primitive” humanity Prichard helped pioneer the key implication of race in the later nineteenth century: that some races were undeveloped physically and intellectually, still trapped in the farthest reaches of the past, a condition that would come to be described as “prehistory.” ⁹⁹

Concerned, as many others were, by the routinely fatal effects that colonial expansion was having on Indigenous populations worldwide, Prichard became a member of the Aborigines’ Protection Society. Much of his concern was driven by an intensely moralistic, Christian critique of colonial rapacity and cruelty, but it was also informed by an emergent scientific racism that construed the less civilized and more ‘primitive’ races as unable to withstand the shock of encounter with civilization, ill-suited to resist its temptations, and destined to disappear. It was this that prompted his lament in 1839 to the British Association for the Advancement of Science that, “[w]herever Europeans have settled, their arrival has been the harbinger of extermination to the native tribes.” ¹⁰⁰ In response Prichard, along with Hodgkin, Darwin, and others, was commissioned to produce a set of “queries” published by the association in 1842. These urged travelers able to observe the “races of man” before they became extinct that, “[t]he head is so important as distinctive of race, that particular attention must be paid to it.” ¹⁰¹ Notably, these queries did not stipulate skull collection, only measurement and accurate depiction in order to illustrate race.

Prichard’s racial methodology was based on the techniques of Scottish stadial history that sifted through and sorted diverse sources of evidence, supplying their deficits and gaps with conjectures and speculations that could be didactically presented as proofs of a foregone conclusion: humanity had become divided into superior and inferior races over vast stretches of time. As Rudwick points out, it is no coincidence that emergent sciences of geology and ethnology at this time both converged on the morphologies of deep time. As geologists studied mountains and rock strata to reckon the vast scale of the Earth’s history, so Prichard and Jameson sought to unravel the deeper human past in skulls. ¹⁰² Jameson likened the philological quest for racial origins to tracing the shape of a “mountain chain,” just as others argued that the “fortuitous excrescences” of the “Hindoo cranium” could “no more hide the real development of the brain from the phrenologist, than those terrestrial inequalities, the Himalayan chain of mountains, conceal the rotundity of this planet from the recognition of the astronomer.” ¹⁰³

Although Prichard’s student dissertation made no mention of skulls as evidence of racial variety, he did make reference to the “new light” of knowledge shed by “the sagacious Blumenbach.” ¹⁰⁴ In 1813, Prichard explicitly recommended that the “configuration of the skull” provided the “most striking, and important instance of diversity in the human form.” ¹⁰⁵ Prichard’s third edition of Researches (1837–47) placed even greater emphasis on skull morphology. This edition also included costly lithographic plates of skulls that were designed to showcase varietal particularities, along with a new chapter discussing distinct skull forms. ¹⁰⁶ By this time, Prichard had adopted a technique proposed by the comparative anatomist Richard Owen (1804–92), who used supposed human brain size to differentiate the species from apes. As Prichard described it, Owen showed how to measure “every part” of the cranium in order to compare “all the different aspects which the skull presents: the basis of the cranium, the vertical figure, the profile, and the front view.” ¹⁰⁷ Though both Owen and Prichard considered humans to share essential similarities, Prichard outlined seven different “varieties” or “classes of nations” that were so “strikingly” different from one another that he concluded it was human skull shape that was “most strongly characteristic of different races.” ¹⁰⁸ Prichard confidently declared that “African craniums” could be distinguished as those that “recede most from the European.” ¹⁰⁹

As James Poskett has shown, Prichard was in close contact with Morton, and was the first to display his illustrations of skulls at the 1839 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Morton in turn dedicated the foreign edition of Crania Americana to Prichard. ¹¹⁰ Prichard also made ample reference to his encounters in Edinburgh with skulls presumed to provide evidence of race. He specifically mentioned the “skull of an Australian savage” in the university museum, as well as skulls from Peru and Australia in the museum of the College of Surgeons, and a copy or “figure” of a Xhosa (known at the time as “Kaffir”) skull that the Edinburgh anatomist Robert Knox (1791–1862) provided. Prichard also referred to an Australian skull belonging to the professor of anatomy Alexander Monro tertius (1773–1859). ¹¹¹ Here then was the intellectual foundation for Prichard’s posthumously published instructions for the conduct of ethnology in Herschel’s Manual in 1849, and his advocacy there (in contrast to his 1842 “queries”) for the collection of skulls as a scientific practice. In addition to Prichard’s instructions, subsequent editions of the Manual included a chapter by Richard Owen that also instructed zoologists to collect human crania. Despite his lamenting colonial violence and warfare, it was undeniable that colonization supplied the means for Prichard’s own and others’ skull collections in the name of science that “unburied the dead,” literally by instruction. ¹¹²

Conclusion

In this article, we have sought to explicate a long intellectual history of instructed natural history that transformed human beings, their artifacts, and bodily remains, into specimens of race. Prichard was an heir to this history, which was communicated to him through traditions of European natural history, Scottish moral philosophy, and the Enlightenment’s science of man. From these diverse sources, Prichard fashioned a methodology to mine colonial testimony and travel literature produced by imperial conquests, colonization, and enslavement, for raw data or “facts” from which to infer probabilities about race and savagery. There can be no more revealing instance of the imprint of Enlightenment on Prichard’s thought and career than the posthumous publication of his instructions in Herschel’s A Manual of Scientific Enquiry. Scholars have interpreted his instructions as a thorough attempt to put ethnology on a firmly scientific basis by instructing “travellers, explorers and missionaries” to produce accurate, reliable, and verifiable information that would enable the emergent science to be considered more than “an armchair pursuit.” ¹¹³ We have argued in this article for a more thoroughly contextualized intellectual history of Prichard’s instructions.

The key to understanding the intellectual history we trace is to pay closer attention to the contexts from which Prichard’s textual and material sources were derived. These included travel accounts punctuated by violence, dispossession, and imperial repossession. They also encompassed commentaries on the conditions of slave populations and their exposure to sexual assault sanitized as assimilation of the fruits of “civilization”. Yet from his earliest student dissertation, Prichard maintained that there were other important sources of information that could be integrated into the science of man. These included testimony on the complexion of the children of colonists in the plantations of the West Indies “provided by natives of these islands.” ¹¹⁴ Further information was drawn from his own empirical observation of the “black colour” of the genitalia of a male “negro,” that “I have ascertained by inspection.” ¹¹⁵ It would later include his recommendation of the systematic collection of skulls, of “correct portraits” by means of a “profile or shaded outline” of heads, or the “use of photography” to provide “correct ideas” about the variety of human races. ¹¹⁶

Instructions such as those by Prichard and Jameson put ancestral remains at the heart of European and North American museums. Human remains featured merely as one group of items among others that illustrated natural history and appeared in numerical lists alongside minerals, insects, models, and taxidermied animals. ¹¹⁷ Neither the instructions or the itemization of crania in museum records provide us with much information on how collectors procured crania. Nor do they illuminate how they ended up in European and American and many other museums such as those at Edinburgh. They reveal even less about the life stories of the people who became specimens of race. Aside from his endorsement of the new technique of photography, Prichard’s 1849 instructions were nothing new. In fact, they exemplified his reliance on and elaboration of a long tradition of instructing natural historians. That pan-European tradition of instructing natural history connected ideas of scientific racism in the nineteenth century to the era of Enlightenment in the eighteenth, by means of transforming human beings into specimens collected in quest of a science of race.