to other Branches of Knowledge, 311 



heads. He found that skulls of Europeans, when thus mea- 

 sured, gave an angle of 80°, the skull of a Kalmuck one of 

 75°, and the skull of a Negro one of 70° only. There are 

 forms of the head in which the angle has been found to be 

 greater than in the European, and others in which it is less 

 than in the Negro. Those which have it greater than in the 

 European, and in which it amounts to 90°, are the ideal heads 

 of Grecian gods, forms not existing in nature ; and the skulls 

 in which this angle is less than in the Negro, are those of 

 apes. In these last, the angle was estimated by Camper 

 at 64°, 63°, or 60°. Camper accordingly thought that he 

 found in the skulls of negroes a type intermediate between 

 the cranium of the European man and that of the Orang. 

 But in this he was mistaken. The supposed gradation exists 

 only when skulls are compared which have the infantine 

 form, or before the first dentition is complete. After the 

 period of the first dentition, the difference in the facial angle 

 in the heads of apes, and in those human skulls in which it is 

 of the smallest measurement, becomes enormous. In the 

 adult Troglodyte it is 35°, and in the orang or satyr it is only 

 30°, as we learn from the observations of Professor Owen. 



Professor Blumenbach was, in reality, the founder of ethno- 

 logy. He was the first person who made any considerable 

 collection of human skulls, or possessed the materials re- 

 quisite for an inquiry into the anatomical differences which 

 exist in various tribes of men. Blumenbach divided the 

 forms of the human head into five departments. He desig- 

 nated them, not as it would perhaps have been better to have 

 done in the first instance, by epithets descriptive of forms, 

 but by the names of the races of people to which they be- 

 longed, or of the regions of the world whence these races 

 were supposed to have originated. The Caucasian form was 

 so termed from Mount Caucasus, to which Blumenbach ob- 

 served that ancient traditions refer the origin of many cele- 

 brated nations. He supposed this to be the primitive type 

 of the human skull, and regarded the other forms as so many 

 degenerations from it. These were the Mongolian, the Ame- 

 rican, the Ethiopian, and the Malayan. The five forms were 

 supposed to belong to five divisions of mankind, comprising 



