The History of White People Read Online Free PDF Page B

     
     

* Nineteenth-and twentieth-century racial scientists later termed the characteristic Camper measured “prognatism” and linked it to skin color and racial worth.
     
     

† On the PetrusCamper.com website of Camper’s biographer Miriam Claude Meijer, this is the only image associated with Camper’s work.
     
     

* In 1779 Camper presented his ideas to skeptical learned men in Göttingen, including the young Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. Over the years, Blumenbach grew ever more doubtful of the validity of Camper’s system, rejecting it as too simple to provide scientific data. Lavater outlived Camper and also came to harbor reservations regarding the usefulness of the facial angle.
     
     

* Not least was the London Royal Society, over which the wealthy naturalist Sir Joseph Banks, baronet, presided. Hunter so cherished his membership in the Royal Society that he named his only surviving son John Banks Hunter. After Hunter’s death, in 1793, Banks refused the gift of Hunter’s painstakingly collected 13,682 dried and wet animal specimens, not considering it to be “an object of importance to the general study of natural history.” After being shifted from place to place in London following Hunter’s death, two-thirds of the collection disappeared in the Nazi bombing of London in 1941. Like many others interested in presenting humanity hierarchically, Hunter was a conservative who “would rather have seen his museum on fire than show it to a democrat.”
     
     

† White advocated natural childbirth; his Treatise on the Management of Pregnant and Lying-in Women , published in 1773, was translated into French and German and appeared in an American edition as well. White had studied medicine in London with John Hunter’s brother William, to whom he dedicated the treatise.
     
     

‡ A well-respected medical doctor in his own right, White also published notes from John Hunter’s lectures in anatomy, as well as treatises on gynecology and obstetrics.
     
     

* In Query XIV in Notes on the State of Virginia , written in the early 1780s, Jefferson asks rhetorically, “Is not the foundation of greater or less share of beauty in the two races [of importance]? Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one preferable to that eternal monotony which reigns in the countenances, that immovable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race?”
     
     

* The great Linnaeus, the inventor of the Western system of taxonomy, shot high even faster. After one week he received his Ph.D. for a thirteen-page dissertation from the Dutch University of Harderwijk, which one historian of science designated as a “mail-order” institution. This seems unduly harsh. Nevertheless, the University of Harderwijk was known for selling degrees.
     
     

† Blumenbach’s prime years in the last quarter of the eighteenth century coincided with his university’s apogee.
     
     

* Germany’s National Socialist regime took such anthropological collecting of skeletons and skulls to a perverted, murderous extreme.
     
     

† Less gently than Blumenbach, Buffon criticized Linnaeus for confusing monsters with races. Linnaeus also associated geography with temperament, a linkage that became commonplace in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
     
     

* To explain his addition of the new group “Malay,” Blumenbach cites the account of Johann Reinhold Forster (1729–98) of Captain James Cook’s second voyage to the South Pacific (1772–75), on which Forster and his son Georg (1754–94) headed a team of naturalists. Of English background, both Forsters lived and worked in Germany. They published accounts of the voyage: Georg Forster, A Voyage round the World, in His Britannic Majesty’s Sloop, Resolution, Commanded by Capt. James Cook, during the Years 1772, 3, 4, and 5 (1777); and Johann Reinhold Forster, Observations