Agassiz’s polygenist theory grew from Morton’s skull-based racial science.

Evidence

The daguerreotype was a relatively new medium in the 1850s that predated photography as we know it today. Papa Renty’s image was captured on a silver daguerreotype plate, an art form reserved for very wealthy family portraits at the time. Agassiz was a Swiss-born zoologist who studied comparative anatomy in France with Baron Georges Cuvier. His groundbreaking work was in classifying and ordering more than 500 fish species of Brazil and identifying 340 new genera. I continued to read and learned that Agassiz came to the United States in 1846 to take a post at Harvard University, which was where things turned dark. That was when he met Dr. Samuel Morton, a physician and anatomist based in Philadelphia who had published two books using human skulls to prove his theory that “races of mankind had been separately created as distinct and unequal species.” — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 156

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the scientific lineage linking Cuvier-anatomy training to Morton’s skull collections to Agassiz’s separate-creation theory.