Morton’s skull science assumed bigger skulls meant bigger intellects

Evidence

THE FOUNDER OF anthropology in the United States, Dr. Samuel Morton, jumped into the origins debate on September 1, 1839, when he published Crania Americana. He had made use of his famous “American Golgotha” at Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences, the world’s largest collection of human skulls. Morton wanted to give scholars an objective tool for distinguishing the races: mathematical comparative anatomy. He had made painstaking measurements of the “mean internal capacity” of nearly one hundred skulls in cubic inches. Finding that the skulls from the “Caucasian Race” measured out the largest in that tiny sample, Morton concluded that Whites had “the highest intellectual endowments” of all the races. He relied on an incorrect assumption, however: the bigger the skull, the bigger the intellect of the person. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 478

Categorization

• XREF: A textbook case for the reader’s test: coercive policy (enslavement) preceded and demanded this ‘objective’ scientific justification — exactly Kendi’s inversion. Also connects to Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man on Morton’s measurement fraud.