MEASURING BODIES
(p. 103) Vogt's remarkable statement equating the brains of adult
blacks and white women with those of white male children and
explaining, on this basis, the failure of black people to build any
civilization worthy of his notice.
Cope also focused upon the skull, particularly upon "those
important elements of beauty, a well-developed nose and beard"
(1887, pp. 288-290), but he also derided the deficient calf muscu-
lature of blacks:
Two of the most prominent characters of the negro are those of imma-
ture stages of the Indo-European race in its characteristic types. The defi-
cient calf is the character of infants at a very early stage; but, what is more
important, the flattened bridge of the nose and shortened nasal cartilages
are universally immature conditions of the same parts in the Indo-
European. ... In some races—e.g., the Slavic—this undeveloped character
persists later than in some others. The Greek nose, with its elevated bridge,
coincides not only with aesthetic beauty, but with developmental perfec-
tion.In 1890 American anthropologist D. G. Brinton summarized the
argument with a paean of praise for measurement:
The adult who retains the more numerous fetal, infantile or simian
traits, is unquestionably inferior to him whose development has pro-
gressed beyond them.... Measured by these criteria, the European or
white race stands at the head of the list, the African or negro at its foot.
... All parts of the body have been minutely scanned, measured and
weighed, in order to erect a science of the comparative anatomy of the
races (1890, p. 48).If anatomy built the hard argument of recapitulation, psychic
development offered a rich field for corroboration. Didn't every-
one know that savages and women are emotionally like children?
Despised groups had been compared with children before, but the
theory of recapitulation gave this old chestnut the respectability of
main-line scientific theory. "They're like children" was no longer
just a metaphor of bigotry; it now embodied a theoretical claim that
inferior people were literally mired in an ancestral stage of supe-
rior groups.
G. Stanley Hall, then America's leading psychologist, stated the
general argument in 1904: "Most savages in most respects are chil-
ren, or, because of sexual maturity, more properly, adolescents of