The greatest cranial enthusiast of all, now forgotten but once very famous indeed, was Barnard Davis (1801–81), a doctor in the English Midlands. Davis became gripped by craniometry in the 1840s and rapidly made himself into the world’s supreme authority. He produced a stream of books with weighty titles like On the Peculiar Crania of the Inhabitants of Certain Groups of Islands in the Western Pacific and Contributions Towards Determining the Weight of the Brain in Different Races of Man. These were surprisingly popular. On Synostotic Crania Among Aboriginal Races of Man went through fifteen editions. The epic Crania Britannica, published in two volumes, had thirty-one editions. Davis became so celebrated that people from all over the world, among them the president of Venezuela, left their skulls for him to study. Gradually, he built up the world’s largest collection of skulls—1,540 in all, or more than all the skulls in all the world’s other institutions combined.
Davis would stop at almost nothing to enlarge his collection. When he wished for skulls from the indigenous people of Tasmania, he wrote to George Robinson, official protector of aborigines, for a selection. Because the plundering of aboriginal graves had by this time become a criminal act, Davis supplied Robinson with detailed instructions on how to remove a skull from an indigenous Tasmanian and replace it with the skull of any convenient surrogate in a way that would avoid arousing suspicions. He was evidently successful in his endeavors, for his collection soon included sixteen Tasmanian skulls and one whole skeleton.
Davis’s fundamental ambition was to prove that dark-skinned people were created separately from light-skinned people. He was convinced that a person’s intellect and moral compass were indelibly written in the curves and apertures of the skull and that these were exclusively products of race and class. People with “cephalic peculiarities” should be treated “not as criminals but as dangerous idiots,” he suggested. In 1878, at the age of seventy-seven, he married a woman fifty years his junior. What her cranium was like is unknown.
This instinct on the part of European authorities to prove all other races inferior was widespread, if not universal. In England, in 1866 the eminent physician John Langdon Haydon Down (1828–96) first described the condition that we now know as Down’s syndrome in a paper called “Observations on an Ethnic Classification of Idiots,” but he referred to it as “Mongolism” and its victims as “Mongoloid idiots” in the belief that they were suffering an innate regression to an inferior, Asiatic type. Down believed, and no one seems to have doubted him, that idiocy and ethnicity were conjoined qualities. He also listed “Malay” and “Negroid” as regressive types.
In Italy, meanwhile, Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), the country’s most eminent physiologist, developed a parallel theory called criminal anthropology. Lombroso believed that criminals were evolutionary throwbacks who betrayed their criminal instincts through a range of anatomical features—slope of the forehead, whether their earlobes were rounded or spade shaped, even the amount of spacing between their toes. (People with a lot of toe space were closer to apes, he explained.) Though his assertions were without the faintest scientific validity, Lombroso was widely esteemed and is even now sometimes referred to as the father of modern criminology. Lombroso was frequently called as an expert witness. In one case, cited by Stephen Jay Gould in The Mismeasure of Man, he was asked to determine which of two men had killed a woman. Lombroso declared one man self-evidently guilty because he had “enormous jaws, frontal sinuses and zygomata, thin upper lip, huge incisors, unusually large head [and] tactile obtuseness with sensorial manicinism.” Never mind that no one knew what much of that meant and that there was no actual evidence against the poor fellow. He was found guilty.
But the most influential, and unexpected, practitioner of craniometry was the great French anatomist Pierre Paul Broca (1824–80). Broca was without question a brilliant scientist. In 1861, during an autopsy on a stroke victim who hadn’t spoken for years except to repeat endlessly the syllable “tan,” Broca discovered the brain’s speech center in the frontal lobe—the first time that anyone had connected an area of the brain to a specific action. The speech center is still called Broca’s area, and the impediment Broca discovered is Broca’s aphasia. (Under it, a person can understand speech but can’t reply except to utter meaningless noises or sometimes stock phrases like “I’ll say” or “Oh, boy.”)
Broca was less astute, however, with respect to character traits. He was convinced, even when all the evidence was against him, that females, criminals, and dark-skinned foreigners had smaller, less agile brains than their white male counterparts. Whenever Broca was presented with evidence that contradicted this, he disregarded it on the grounds that it must be flawed. He was similarly disinclined to believe a study from Germany showing that German brains were on average a hundred grams weightier than French ones. He explained this awkward discrepancy by suggesting that the French subjects were very old when tested and that their brains had shrunk. “The degree of decadence that old age can impose upon a brain is very variable,” he observed. He also had problems accounting for why executed criminals sometimes had big brains, and decided that their brains had become artificially engorged by the stress of hanging. The greatest indignity of all came when Broca’s own brain was measured upon his death and was found to be smaller than average.
* * *
—
The person who finally put the study of the human head on something like a sound scientific foundation was none other than the great Charles Darwin. In 1872, thirteen years after he published On the Origin of Species, Darwin produced another landmark work, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, which looked at expressions reasonably and without prejudice. The book was revolutionary not just for being sensible but for observing that certain expressions appear to be common to all peoples. This was a much bolder utterance than we may realize today because it underlined Darwin’s conviction that all people, whatever their race, have a common heritage, and that was a very revolutionary thought in 1872.
What Darwin realized was something that all babies know instinctively—that the human face is highly expressive and instantly captivating. No two authorities seem to agree on quite how many expressions we can make—estimates range from forty-one hundred to ten thousand—but it is clearly a large number. More than forty muscles, a significant portion of the body’s total, are involved in facial expression. Babies fresh from the womb are said to prefer a face, or even the general pattern of a face, to any other shape. Whole regions of the brain are devoted solely to recognizing faces. We are exquisitely sensitive to the subtlest alterations of mood or expression, even if we are not always conscious of them. In an experiment related by Daniel McNeill in his book The Face, men were shown two photos of women that were identical in every respect except that the pupils had been subtly enlarged in one. Although the change was too slight to be consciously perceived, the test subjects invariably found the women with larger pupils more attractive, though they were at a loss to explain why.