Year: 1799
Scientist/artist: Charles White
Originally published in: An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man, and in Different Animals and Vegetables
Now appears in: The Flamingo's Smile by Stephen Jay Gould and Humankind by Felipe Fernández-Armesto
This particularly odious depiction of "lower" and "higher" life forms was once widely accepted as part of the Great Chain of Being. In this depiction, the lowest form of human life is the Negro, and at the top of the ladder is the Greek ideal. The depictions are carefully arranged so that "lower" humans appear in close proximity to "lower" animals. "In whatever respect the African differs from the European," White wrote, "the particularity brings him nearer to the ape."
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Year: 1799
Scientist/artist: Charles White
Originally published in: An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man, and in Different Animals and Vegetables
Now appears in: Humankind by Felipe Fernández-Armesto
White described this plate as including "copies of the best authenticated engraving" of apes, as well as profiles of a "native of Botany Bay" and an African.

Year: 1731
Scientist/artist: Johann Jakob Scheuchzer
Originally published in: Sacred Physics
Now appears in: Crossing Over by Stephen Jay Gould and Rosamond Wolff Purcell
Swiss naturalist Johann Jakob Scheuchzer found the Old Testament a perfectly plausible account of the history of life on earth. But he also tried to reconcile the story with discoveries about the natural world, including the existence of apes. In this image, Scheuchzer compared biblical Esau (Jacob's inordinately hairy, slightly dim-witted older twin) with a "satyr" (the term at the time for chimpanzees). The 18th-century naturalist stopped short of calling the father of the Edomites an ape. "Nonetheless, in making this comparison, I do not with to insinuate that Esau was a Satyr, nor that this race of savage animals has descended from him. I consider Esau as a monstrous man."
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Year: 1731
Scientist/artist: Johann Jakob Scheuchzer
Originally published in: Sacred Physics
Now appears in: Fossils: Evidence of Vanished Worlds by Yvette Gayrard-Valy and Cradle of Life by J. William Schopf
"The reality of the Universal Deluge, albeit acknowledged for many centuries, has never been more patent than it is at the present time." So declared Scheuchzer in describing this specimen, which he named Homo diluvii testis. This "witness to the flood" was a 4-foot-long fossil with eyes that had apparently widened their sockets with horror at the rising waters. Decades later, Georges Cuvier reexamined and cleaned the fossil, and discovered its clawed forefeet. It wasn't a human witness to Noah's flood; it was a big, extinct salamander. The species was later renamed, in Scheuchzer 's dubious honor, Andrias scheuchzeri.
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Years: 1839-1849, 1977-1996
Scientists: Samuel George Morton, Stephen Jay Gould
Artist: John Collins
Originally published in: Crania Americana
Now appears in: "The Mismeasure of Science: Stephen Jay Gould versus Samuel George Morton on Skulls and Bias" by Lewis et al. in PLoS Biology
In the mid-19th century, Morton measured hundreds of skulls from different ethnic groups to determine differences in cranial capacity, initially using mustard seed and later, on a more diverse sample, lead shot. In the late 20th century, Gould reanalyzed Morton's results and found them lacking, as he explained in The Mismeasure of Man. Gould did not accuse Morton of deliberately falsifying his results, and pointed out that Morton published his raw data, something he wouldn't have done if he felt he had anything to hide. But Morton's conclusions that Caucasians consistently came out on top, plus changes in some skull measurements between the seed-based and shot-based studies, led Gould to conclude that Morton's assumptions about race subconsciously influenced his results. Gould did not actually re-measure Morton's skulls, but in the early 21st century, a group of anthropologists did — at least some of them. They found that Morton, whom Gould made the poster boy of a priori assumptions, had actually done a reasonably accurate job. The errors he did make were mostly random, and the skulls he consistently inflated were Egyptian, people he would have classified as Negro. Ironically, Gould's findings on cranial capacity were actually closer to the assumptions he presumed Morton made than were Morton's own findings. The 2011 study concluded that Gould's criticisms of Morton were at best poorly substantiated and at worst false. Morton's study did include errors, and he apparently held views that typified the racism of the time, but the 2011 researchers concluded, "Biased scientists are inevitable, biased results are not." A Nature editorial the following week observed, "Of course, Lewis and his colleagues have their own motivations. Several in the group have an association with the University of Pennsylvania, and have an interest in seeing the valuable but understudied skull collection freed from the stigma of bias (although, as for many 19th-century museum collections, its ethically dubious assembly will remain an issue)."

Year: 1857
Scientist: George R. Gliddon
Originally published in: Indigenous Races of the Earth
Now appears in: "The Moral Discourse of Climate: Historical Considerations on Race, Place and Virtue" by David Livingstone in Journal of Historical Geography
Gliddon was a practitioner of anthropometric cartography, and he argued that climate drove character. This image is part of a diagram he included in his book, "Chart illustrative of the geographical distribution of monkeys in their relation to that of some inferior types of men." Besides arguing that no civilization had ever arisen where black people lived, he went on to say, "the most superior types of Monkeys are found to be indigenous exactly where we encounter races of some of the most inferior types of Men." Many of Gliddon's contemporaries agreed with him (Alexander von Humboldt being a notable exception). The reasoning went like this: People living in temperate climates were fashioned by nature to be smart, hardworking, upright citizens. People who lived in the tropics were slackers, and pretty loose slackers at that. You would think, considering the presumed relationship between cold and character, that people living in or near the Arctic would be overachievers, but no. Somehow they were slackers, too. As for whether the races shared a common origin, convictions varied. Gliddon believed in multiple origins, but others argued that we all arose from common stock, only some races improved over time, and the races that headed south (or too far north) degenerated.

Year: 1895
Scientist: Paul Du Chaillu
Originally published in: Stories of the Gorilla Country
Now appears in: "Race, Sex and the Trials of a Young Explorer" by Richard Conniff in The New York Times (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/race-sex-and-the-trials-a-young-explorer/)
In the mid-19th century, an intrepid young explorer named Paul Du Chaillu ventured into the jungles of Gabon. In the four years he spent there, he encountered gorillas, and brought back some 20 specimens. They arrived on the scientific scene about the time that Darwin and Wallace introduced the theory of natural selection. Gorillas are certainly big and strong, but Du Chaillu depicted the gorilla as a "hellish dream creature." In writing about his African expedition, he also embellished accounts of his travels, and may even have plagiarized the works of others. Yet Du Chaillu's reputation tanked not so much for what he wrote about Africa as for his alleged relationship to it. Whispers circulated that amateur naturalist wasn't entirely white. The Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia sponsored Du Chaillu's trip, and science historian Richard Conniff argues that the same academy might have kicked Du Chaillu out in 1860 at least in part because an academy officer named George Ord fretted over the shape of the naturalist's head and facial features. In short, Ord wrote, he discerned "evidence of spurious origin." Du Chaillu's father was a slave owner and his mother was probably mixed race — something Ord blamed for Du Chaillu's overly dramatic accounts of his travels. "If it be a fact that he is a mongrel, or a mustee, as the mixed races are termed in the West Indies, then we may account for his wondrous narratives; for I have observed that it is a characteristic of the negro race, and their admixtures, to be affected to habits of romance."

Year: 1794
Scientist/artist: Pieter Camper
Originally published in: The Works of the Late Professor Camper
Now appears in: Science: A Four Thousand Year History by Patricia Fara
It's far from obvious, but this image was actually intended to show that differences between races were superficial. Dutch anatomist Camper was an abolitionist. The faces appear along a spectrum that measures the angle at which the face slopes backward — from apes to Apollo. Although the grid lines lend an air of mathematical finality, the scale is really one of aesthetics, with the unlikely pinnacle of a Greek god. Although aimed at minimizing the perceived differences between races, this diagram apparently had the opposite effect.

Year: 1795
Scientist/artist: J.F. Blumenbach
Originally published in: De generis humani varietate nativa
Now appears in: I Have Landed by Stephen Jay Gould
Pieter Camper wasn't the only well-intentioned 18th-century naturalist whose work had the opposite effect of what he hoped. Although he probably assumed (as did everyone he knew) that Europeans outshone everybody else, Blumenbach was an abolitionist who maintained that slaves' morality often surpassed that of their masters. (He especially admired the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, a Boston slave.) Moreover, Blumenbach argued forcefully that humans comprised a single species — hardly a view shared by many of his peers. But Blumenbach made a blunder with long-lasting effects. Whereas his role model Linnaeus had classified human races based on geography, Blumenbach classified them based on a purely subjective judgment: beauty. Blumenbach concluded that mankind arose — and the most beautiful people on earth continued to live — in the Caucasus (hence Caucasian). He figured that other races diverged from their ancestral types as they adapted to different environments. This illustration shows the "ideal" Caucasian skull in the middle. Moving toward the left are American Indian and Mongolian skulls. On the right are Malay and African skulls. Blumenbach's personal preference became, for many people, just more evidence of intellectual and moral superiority.

Year: 1822
Scientist/artist: William Buckland
Originally published in: Goat Hole Cave, Paviland
Now appears in: Homo Britannicus by Chris Stringer
William Buckland completed one of the first, if not the very first, reconstructions of living habits when he examined fossil hyena remains in Kirkdale Cave. About the same time, he discovered an ancient human skeleton: a Cro-Magnon fossil at Goat Hole Cave. Buckland produced detailed diagrams of the cave and noted that the skeleton was covered with red ochre, possibly the result of a burial ceremony. Buckland probably had no way of knowing how ancient or significant his find was. He also had no great means of determining the individual's gender. He described the ancient human (perhaps jokingly) as a witch, then gave the more palatable name of "Red Lady of Paviland." The ochre-covered human was less-than-average height for a Cro-Magnon male fossil, at least compared to other finds, and that might explain why Buckland misinterpreted the male fossil as female. Still, for such an early find, it wasn't a bad effort.
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Year: 1493
Originally published in: Nuremberg Chronicle
Now appears in: Amazing Rare Things by Attenborough, Owens, Clayton and Alexandratos
Europeans imagined all sorts of odd "people" lived elsewhere in the world: people with horns, with giant floppy ears, with giant single feet, to name a few. This late 15th-century publication shows a few of the odd humans assumed to live elsewhere. The bottom picture shows a human whose face appears on his or her torso. The middle picture is of a cyclops. The top picture is apparently of a werewolf crossed with a cheesy lounge singer.

Year: 1475
Scientist/artist: Konrad von Megenberg
Originally published in: Book of Nature
Now appears in: "Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters" by Rudolf Wittkower in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 1942
The notion that faraway lands — India in particular — held monstrous human races arose in Antiquity, when some Greek scholars spread fabulous accounts. The Greeks had their share of skeptics who challenged such stories, but while the skeptics' criticisms were lost to medieval Europeans, the fantastic tales lived on, thanks to the uncritical writings of Pliny and others. For all their belief in monstrous races, Europeans in the Middle Ages adopted a pretty generous stance about them, insisting that even the monstrous races were God's children. Monsters as portents of divine punishment may have been more common during the sectarian tensions of the Reformation.

Century: 13th
Scientist/artist: Zakariya ibn Muhammad ibn Mahmud Abu Yahya al-Qazwini
Originally published in: Aja'ib al-Makhluqat
Now appears in: Science in Medieval Islam by Howard R. Turner
Just as Europeans had outlandish ideas of odd people who might live far away, Muslim scholars entertained equally fanciful notions. Published in what is today Iraq, this encyclopedia of the "Wonders of Creation" covered a range of topics, mixing fact and fiction about geography and biology.

Year: 1851
Scientist/artist: Robert Knox
Originally published in: The Races of Men
Now appears in: Making Modern Science by Bowler and Morus
If the work of Robert Knox was any indication, not much improved in race relations between the beginning and the middle of the 19th century. To Victorian minds, a sloping forehead implied and tiny brain, and Knox sure wanted his readers to get his point about people of color.

Year: 1758
Scientist/artist: Carolus Linnaeus
Originally published in: Systema Naturae
Now appears in: Human Origins: The Search for Our Beginnings by Herbert Thomas
It's impossible to overestimate the contribution Linnaeus made to science — he developed the system for classifying all living organisms that is still in use today. Yet his uncertainty about how to classify apes and humans is obvious from some of his depictions. He even developed terms such as "day man" and "night man," and admitted that he couldn't find a characteristic to differentiate humans from apes.

Year: 1812
Scientist/artist: F. Jacob
Originally published in: Histoire Naturelle des Singes
Now appears in: Human Origins: The Search for Our Beginnings by Herbert Thomas
Jacob showed the fetus of a monkey and a human side by side to illustrate their similarities, maintaining that the only thing the monkey lacked was a soul.

Year: 1868
Scientist: Ernst Haeckel
Originally published in: Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte
Now appears in: Human Origins: The Search for Our Beginnings by Herbert Thomas
Haeckel divided humanity into no less than 12 distinct species, based upon hair type, skull shape, skin color and eye color. Although he believed humanity now comprised 12 species, he maintained that they had all arisen from a single ancestral type that once lived on a continent now submerged beneath the Indian Ocean.

Year: 1868
Scientist: Ernst Haeckel
Artist: Gustav Müller
Originally published in: Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (1st edition)
Now appears in: "Pictures of Evolution and Charges of Fraud" by Nick Hopwood in Isis June 2006 issue
Reminiscent of Charles White's 1799 diagram, this illustration pointed out the affinity between the "lowest humans" and "highest apes." The heads pictured here were supposed to represent — from best to worst, so to speak — Indo-German, Chinese, Fuegian, Australian Negro, African Negro, Tasmanian, gorilla, chimpanzee, orang, gibbon, proboscis monkey, and mandrill. An interesting shift from White's diagram was that the best of the best was no longer Grecian but German. In fairness to Haeckel, he didn't like this illustration much (his publisher apparently did), but an expanded version appeared in the second edition of his book. Haeckel was, to say the least, confident of the superiority of the white race, as were many of his contemporaries. But at least one scientist, Michael Foster described the illustration in Haeckel's second book as "at once absurdly horrible and theatrically grotesque, without any redeeming feature either artistic or scientific."
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Year: 1870
Scientist: Ernst Haeckel
Originally published in: Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (2nd edition)
Now appears in: The Tragic Sense of Life by Robert J. Richards
For the second edition of Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, Haeckel drafted new pictures. As in the first version, the pinnacle of humanity was the Greek ideal, but this time, the Greek sported a beard. So, by pure coincidence, did Haeckel.
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Year: 1909
Originally published in: Illustrated London News
Scientist: Marcellin Boule
Artist: Frantisek Kupka
Now appears in: Life by Richard Fortey and God — or Gorilla: Images of Evolution in the Jazz Age by Constance Areson Clark (Also discussed in Java Man by Swisher, Curtis and Lewin)
As this depiction of a Neanderthal shows, some early 20th-century scientists thought this hominid to be very furry. Earlier hypotheses about the first Neanderthal fossil suggested that the individual suffered from rickets, hence the bowed legs, and that the pain from the condition caused the sufferer to habitually furrow his brow, producing prominent brow ridges. (In fact, extensive use of facial muscles can cause bone buildup where those muscles attach, but they can't make a modern human skull look Neanderthal.)

Year: 1922
Originally published in: Illustrated London News
Scientists: Henry Fairfield Osborn and Grafton Elliot Smith
Now appears in: God — or Gorilla: Images of Evolution in the Jazz Age by Constance Areson Clark
The year 1922 found the American Museum of Natural History's Henry Fairfield Osborn clashing with ardent anti-evolutionist William Jennings Bryan, the "Scopes Monkey Trial" being just a few years away. When Nebraska paleontologist Harold Cook found a fossil tooth that might belong to a primate, Osborn saw his opportunity. How deliciously ironic that an early human tooth might come from Bryan's own home state! Well, the tooth did come from Nebraska. It also came from a pig. Bryan and generations of creationists delighted in pointing out Osborn's gaffe. Fewer have been anxious to acknowledge that the definitive debunking of Hesperopithecus (Nebraska Man) came from William King Gregory — an evolutionist and Osborn's own former student.
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Year: 1927
Appears in: "Recent Discoveries Relating to the Origin and Antiquity of Man" in Science
Scientists: Henry Fairfield Osborn
In a single paper in Science, Osborn slammed Darwin, Haeckel and Huxley for missing or ignoring "the profound cleft between ape and man;" asserted that "the home of primitive man should be looked for in the same kind of country in which the primitive horse flourished" (that would be Asia); asserted that Neanderthals didn't have to work hard to find food or survive in their environment; insisted that the ancestors of the "higher races of man" could not occur "south of the Neanderthal Eurasiatic belt, because to the south conditions of life were less rigorous;" and described the brain capacity of Homo erectus as "not far inferior to that of the native Indian Veddahs." And he backed up his assertions with the evidence of Piltdown Man and Nebraska Man. Piltdown Man hadn't yet been exposed as a hoax, and Nebraska Man's tooth hadn't yet been identified as that of a pig. This unwelcome bit of dental news would arrive — also in Science — several months later.
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Year: 1931
Originally published in: The Mongol in Our Midst: A Study of Man and His Three Faces
Scientist: Francis Crookshank
Now appears in: "Welcome to the Twilight Zone: A Forgotten Early Phase of Human Evolutionary Studies" by Richard G. Delisle in Endeavour
British physician Crookshank laid out his view of human ancestry in 1931. He believed in polyphyletism, i.e., that humankind had derived from multiple ancestral lines that were isolated from each other. He further linked the different human races with what he believed to be their closest simian relatives. Crookshank wasn't the first polyphyletist but luckily he was one of the last.

Year: 1836
Scientist: George Combe (based on earlier work by Johann Caspar Spurzheim)
Originally published in: Outlines of Phrenology
Now appears in: Victorian Sensation by James A. Secord (Also discussed in Postcards from the Brain Museum by Brian Burrell, and Making Modern Science by Bowler and Morus)
Although modern science has tied certain functions to various regions of the brain, we realize there's still so much we don't know. Nineteenth-century phrenologists were a lot more confident — and convinced that they could tell a patient's mental abilities from the shape of his or her skull. "Phrenological organs" of the brain named in this work included (among many others) destructiveness, secretiveness, veneration, hope, wonder, wit and individuality. Spurzheim, the popularizer of phrenology, took many of his ideas from Franz Josef Gall. Gall and Spurzheim started out as colleagues but later had a philosophical split. Though he got wrapped up in the silly notion of skull shapes, Gall was onto something regarding localization of certain brain functions.

Year: 1744
Scientist: William Smith (not the 19th-century geologist)
Now appears in: Man's Place in Nature by T.H. Huxley
Huxley discredited this image in 1863, and suggested that it really represented a chimpanzee. By the time Huxley wrote, human understanding of the great apes had substantially improved. He quoted from a paper published in 1852 by a new researcher: "opportunities for receiving a knowledge of the [gorilla] have not been wanting; traders having for one hundred years frequented [the Congo region of Africa], and specimens, such as have been brought here within a year, could not have been exhibited without having attracted the attention of the most stupid."

Year: 1915
Scientist: William Diller Matthew
Originally published in: "Climate and Evolution" in Annals N.Y. Acad. Sci.
Now appears in: Man Rises to Parnassus by Henry Fairfield Osborn
Following up a lecture he delivered in 1911, William Diller Matthew published this map showing his hypothesis about the origin and dispersal of human races. From Asia, "Mongols" headed north and into the Americas, "Caucasians" headed into southern and western Europe, "Malays" went eastward and morphed into Australian Aborigines, and "Negroids" aimed for Africa. "Negritos" probably referred to the Khoi-San of southern Africa. Nobody much liked the idea now commonly accepted today: African ancestry for all modern humans.

Year: 1927
Scientist: Henry Fairfield Osborn
Artist: James Howard McGregor
Originally published in: Man Rises to Parnassus by Henry Fairfield Osborn
Titled "The Rise of Character in the Human Face," this collection of busts shows Osborn's conception of human ancestry. Although debate continues about the possible contribution of Neanderthal DNA to that of modern humans, Neanderthals are no longer regarded as direct ancestors. Yet Osborn's inclusion of the Neanderthal as a direct ancestor is dwarfed by another gaffe: the inclusion of Piltdown Man.

Year: c. 1930
Originally appeared in: Traveling exhibit on eugenics
Now appears in: Better for All the World by Harry Bruinius
If people could breed better pigs, chickens and cows, they could certainly breed better children. Traveling exhibits in the first half of the 20th century showed the simple logic of heritage trumping education and environment. Ironically, some of the main thinkers behind the eugenics movement had troubles of their own. Harry Laughlin, who vigorously campaigned for the sterilization of the unfit, kept secret his own epilepsy. Of course, epilepsy in no way diminishes one's worth as a human being (unless, unfortunately, one is a eugenicist). Another thinker behind the movement, Charles Davenport, confidently predicted that his daughter would — like himself — respect the values of Protestant America, manage expenses responsibly, and prefer nature to art. His daughter turned out to be a bohemian spendthrift. Even worse, she was a bohemian spendthrift who defied her daddy and married a Jew.

Year: 1911
Scientist: Charles Davenport
Originally published in: Heredity in Relation to Eugenics
Now appears in: Davenport's Dream edited by Witkowski and Inglis
Eugenicist Charles Davenport believed that practically everything came down to inheritance: intelligence, artistic ability, wanderlust and good (or bad) morals. To support his argument, he published an abundance of inheritance diagrams showing the relationships between various defects. His caption for this one reads, "This mating illustrates the principle that migraine (M) and paralysis frequently indicate the presence of defective germ cells, as well as normal. In the central mating the paralytic father has an insane brother, an insane niece and 3 feeble-minded grandnephews, besides a grandniece, who died in convulsions." Besides M for migraine, Davenport employed these abbreviations: N for normal, A for alcoholic, E for epileptic, F for feeble-minded, I for insane, D inf. for died in infancy. Also written next to some boxes are apparently less serious traits: "neurotic" and "peculiar." When he produced these diagrams, Davenport likely didn't know that his trusted colleague, Harry Laughlin, suffered from epilepsy, a condition he tried to hide for many years. Eugenicists frequently found the condition grounds for forced sterilization.
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Year: 1896
Scientist: Cesare Lombroso
Originally published in: The Man of Genius
Italian anthropologist Cesare Lombroso gained fame for, among other things, alleging that genius was a form of retrograde evolution, and that madness was how biology coped with that genius. Lombroso also asserted that some people are born delinquent, and society should save itself from these hopeless cases by any means necessary. (Lombroso tried convincing Leo Tolstoy of this. Nonplussed, Tolstoy wrote Resurrection to refute the notion.) Besides believing in genius-madness links and born criminals, Lombroso was sure mental attributes could be determined from the appearance of the brain and even the skull. Here he showed some skulls of geniuses, including Volta and Foscolo (inordinately tall) and Kant (exceptional cranial capacity). Given the chance to examine the brain of a contemporary, Carlo Giacomini (who had collected evidence contradicting Lombroso's theory), Lombroso declared victory when he found Giacomini's preserved brain sported a rare feature, a double Rolando sulcus.

Year: 1911
Scientists: Cesare Lombroso and G. Ferrero
Originally published in: "Applications de la nouvelle école au Nord de l'Amérique"
Now appears in: The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould (Lombroso's work also discussed in "Turin's Criminology Museum" by Alison Abbott in Nature Magazine, January 21, 2010 issue)
Lombroso teamed up with colleague Ferrero to illustrate some unprepossessing facial features that identify born criminals. Unfortunately for many accused, the stigmata he described became "evidence" in their criminal trials. While he pushed for capital punishment for the worst "born criminals," Lombroso believed that other deviants had only some or only slightly troubling criminal characteristics — big ears, little heads, protruding brows — and they should simply be placed in asylums. His genetic-throwback explanation of criminality, genius and deviance was known as atavism.

Year: 1586
Scientist: Giambattista Della Porta
Originally published in: De Humana Physiognomia
Now appears in: Astrology, Magic, and Alchemy in Art by Matilde Battistini, translated by Rosanna M. Giammanco Frongia
Della Porta was a respected naturalist and glittering playwright. Unfortunately, his reputation gave his misguided ideas a long life, including the notion that one's character could be inferred from one's face. He apparently considered this example obstinate.

Year: 1586
Scientist: Giambattista Della Porta
Originally published in: De Humana Physiognomia
Now appears at: Historical Anatomies on the Web (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/historicalanatomies/porta_home.html)
In his De Humana Physiognomia Libri IIII, Della Porta produced plenty of examples of human-animal similarities, some less noble than others. Della Porta also believed in the doctrine of signatures, that plants resembling certain body parts could cure what ailed them.
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Century: Early 19th
Scientist: W. Johnson
Now appears in: Blood and Guts by Roy Porter
For centuries, doctors maintained that health and personality were determined by one's balance of four key bodily fluids: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. (Blech.) If you were sanguine, you were ruddy, lively, energetic and hard working, but maybe impulsive and something less than an intellectual giant. If you were phlegmatic, you were chubby and lazy. If you were choleric (with an excess of yellow bile), you might be thin, jaundiced, mean and stingy. If you were melancholic (with an excess of black bile) you were depressed. Paracelsus scorned this mind set in the 16th century, but it persisted anyway. This engraving showed examples of the different temperaments.
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Year: 1945
Scientists: Franz Weidenreich and Roy Chapman Andrews
Artist: T.W. Voter
Originally published in: Meet Your Ancestors by Roy Chapman Andrews
In the mid-1940s, Roy Chapman Andrews wrote a book about paleoanthropology aimed at a popular audience, with "The Family Tree of Man" (only part of which appears here) on the inside cover. The book reflected the views of scientists Andrews truly admired, including Henry Fairfield Osborn and (especially) Franz Weidenreich. (Weidenreich's work led to the multiregional theory of human origins, arguing that modern human races evolved independently from Homo erectus with some gene flow in between.) To his credit, Andrews mentioned Africa's possible role as the cradle of humankind, and he expressed reservations about the Piltdown fossils. New finds in science, however, still couldn't override old feelings about race. Andrews summed up the issue with the example of radishes growing at different rates in different types of soil. So, he stated, "the progress of the different races was unequal." It shouldn't take much effort to guess which race Andrews considered the winner. The "giants" Andrews described belonged to the now-discredited genus of Meganthropus and Gigantopithecus. Gigantopithecus is still considered a valid genus, and modern paleontologists surmise that it may actually have been as much as 10 feet tall, though it's not considered a human ancestor.

Year: 1926
Originally published in: Evolution and Religion in Education
Scientist: Henry Fairfield Osborn
Now appears in: God — or Gorilla: Images of Evolution in the Jazz Age by Constance Areson Clark
In his biography published in 1940, W.E.B. Du Bois remarked, "I remember once in a museum, coming face to face with a demonstration: a series of skeletons arranged from a little monkey to a tall well-developed white man, with a Negro barely outranking a chimpanzee." Henry Fairfield Osborn of the American Museum of Natural History wielded enormous influence, not just at AMNH, but in other museums and in textbooks, which adapted AMNH material. A self-described opponent of "miscegenation," Osborn didn't think twice about which race was the very best. Notice the "Ascent of Increasing Intelligence."

Year: 1929
Originally published in: Our Face from Fish to Man
Scientist: William King Gregory
Now appears in: God — or Gorilla: Images of Evolution in the Jazz Age by Constance Areson Clark
William King Gregory criticized his old mentor, Henry Fairfield Osborn, for "pithecophobia" — a fear of apes and monkeys in the human family tree. But Gregory (like many people) shared Osborn's views of race. This dust jacket includes six stylized faces and one real one. The Tasmanian face, apparently not quite human in Gregory's view, is from a 19th-century photograph of a woman who may have been the last remaining member of Tasmania's native population. Her name was Trucanini, and at the time her picture was taken, she was one of just five survivors in what could be termed an internment camp, established by the British. All of her companions were so ill that they would soon die. Trucanini died in 1876.