I Have Landed (58 page)

Even J. F. Blumenbach (1752–1840), the great Enlightenment thinker (see essay 26) who devised the classification of races that became standard in nineteenth-century science, stoutly defended intellectual equality, while never doubting gradational differences in inherent beauty, with his own Caucasian race on a pinnacle obvious to all. Blumenbach devised the term Caucasian (still employed today) for the white races of Europe because he regarded the people living near Mount Caucasus as the best among the comeliest—“really the most beautiful form of skull,” he writes, “which always of itself attracts every eye, however little observant.”

I have, during the quarter-century of this series of essays, written about most of these few egalitarians, if only because iconoclasm always attracts me, while moral rectitude (at least by the preferences of most people today) always inspires admiration. But I have never treated the single most remarkable document in this small tradition, probably because its largely unknown author never extended his anthropological research beyond this lone foray into a subject (the status of races) and a language (English) otherwise absent from his extensive and highly valued work.

Perhaps Friedrich Tiedemann (1781–1861) had learned a sad lesson about the fruits of xenophobia from the history of his own adopted city, for “the great physiologist of Heidelberg”—an accolade for Tiedemann from the pen of England's leading anatomist, Richard Owen—served as professor of anatomy, physiology, and zoology at the University (from 1816 until his retirement in 1849), where the ruined castle, perched on a hill above his lecture hall, stood as a mute testimony to human folly and venality.

Following a common pattern among the intellectual elite of his generation (his father served as a professor of Greek and classical literature), Tiedemann wandered among many European universities to study with the greatest teachers of his time. Thus he learned philosophy from Schelling at Würzburg; anatomy from Franz Joseph Gall (the founder of phrenology) in Marburg; zoology from Cuvier in Paris; and anthropology from Blumenbach in Göttingen. Although he did not publish any work on human races until 1836, near the end of his active career in science, he must have internalized the core of this debate during these youthful
Wanderjahren
.

Tiedemann may have chosen his professors for other reasons, but he studied with the most prominent scholars of both persuasions—with the leading egalitarians Blumenbach and Gall (who used phrenology to advocate the material basis of consciousness, and who favored multiple organs of intelligence, expressed in bumps and other features of cranial architecture, largely because each person would then excel in some specific faculty, while no measure could then rank people or groups in a linear order of “general” worth); and with such eminent supporters of racial ranking as Cuvier, and the medical anatomist S. T. Soemmerring, who landed Tiedemann his first job in 1807. (Interestingly, in Tiedemann's 1836 article on race, the focus of this essay, he quotes both Soemmerring and Cuvier in a strong critique on the opening page, but then praises both Gall and Blumenbach later. Tiedemann also dedicated his 1816 book on the comparative anatomy and embryology of brains, the second document discussed in this essay, to Blumenbach. Obviously, Tiedemann remembered the lessons of his youth—and then developed his own critiques and preferences. What more could a teacher desire?

Tiedemann's career began on a fast track, with a textbook on zoology and anatomical dissertations on fish hearts (1809), large reptiles (1811 and 1817), and the lymphatic and respiratory organs of birds. He did not neglect invertebrates, either, winning a prize in 1816 from the Académie des Sciences in Paris for a treatise on the anatomy of echinoderms. He then turned his attention to the first of two major projects in his career—a remarkable study, published in 1816, on
the embryology of the human brain compared with the anatomy of adult brains throughout the Vertebrata.

When Tiedemann took up his position as professor in Heidelberg, his interests switched to physiology—hence the nature of Owen's accolade, used as the title of this essay—largely because he met the remarkable young chemist Leopold Gmelin, and the two men recognized that a combination of anatomical and chemical expertise could resolve some outstanding issues in the mechanics and functioning of human organs. Thus, in the second major project of his career, Tiedemann collaborated with Gmelin on a series of remarkable discoveries about human digestion—recognizing, for example, that the intestines and other organs participate in the process, not only the stomach (as previously believed); that digestion involves chemical transformation (the conversion of starch into glucose, for example), not merely dissolution; and that hydrochloric acid works as a powerful agent of digestion in the stomach.

Then, in 1836, Tiedemann published a stunning article in English in the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London
, Britain's most prestigious scientific journal (then and now): “On the Brain of the Negro, compared with that of the European and the Orang-Outang” (pages 497–527). Why such a shift in focus of research, and why such a foray into a language not his own and never before used to express his research? I do not know the full answer to this intriguing question (for biographical materials on Tiedemann are, to say the least, sparse). But a consideration of his life and work, combined with an exegesis of his two leading publications, provides a satisfactory beginning.

Tiedemann's unusual paper of 1836 states the egalitarian argument pure and simple—with no ifs, ands, or buts about inferior culture or suboptimal beauty. He does follow Blumenbach in accepting European definitions as universal aesthetic norms—a claim that can only strike our modern sensibilities as almost naïvely humorous. But, unlike Blumenbach, he then holds that Africans measure up to Caucasian standards of beauty. Of Africans living freely in the continent's interior, untouched by slavery, Tiedemann writes:

(This remarkable statement illustrates the vintage of conventional prejudice, as the nineteenth century's firmest egalitarian scientist never doubts the “obviously” greater beauty of light skin, straight hair, thin lips, and “Roman or aquiline noses”!)

Tiedemann then argues that the false impression of African ugliness arose from limited studies of people suppressed by slavery and living at the coast:

The technical argument of Tiedemann's paper follows a clear and simple logic to an equally firm conclusion—an exemplar of scientific reasoning, so long as the data hold up to scrutiny and withstand the light of new findings. Tiedemann develops two sources of information to reach the same conclusion. He first uses his anatomical expertise to search for distinctions among the brains of Caucasians (both males and females), black Africans, and orangutans. And he finds no structural differences among humans of different races and sexes. He begins with the cerebrum, the traditional “seat” of intelligence, and concludes: “In the internal structure of the brain of the Negro I did not observe any difference between it and that of the European.” He then studies any other part used by scientific colleagues to assert differences in rank—particularly to test the claim that blacks have thicker nerves than whites. Again, he finds no distinction: “Hence there is no remarkable difference between the medulla oblongata and spinal cord of the Negro and that of the European, except the difference arising from the different size of the body.”

Tiedemann then moves on to a second and clinching argument based on size, for some colleagues had accepted the conclusion of no structural difference, but had then defended racial ranking on supposed grounds of “more is better,” arguing that Caucasians possessed the largest brains among human races, and African blacks the smallest. Tiedemann understood the complexity of this subject, and the consequent need for statistical analysis. He recognized that weighing
a brain or two could not decide the issue because brains grow in correlation with bodies, and larger bodies therefore house bigger brains, quite independently of any hypothetical differences caused by racial inequalities. Tiedemann understood, for example, that small brains of women only reflected their smaller bodies—and that appropriate corrections for size might put women ahead. He therefore writes, controverting the greatest and most ancient authority of all:

Tiedemann also recognized that brain sizes varied greatly among adults of any individual race. Therefore, a prejudiced observer could tout any desired view merely by choosing a single skull to fit his preferences, no matter how unrepresentative such a specimen might be as surrogate for an entire group. Thus, Tiedemann noted, many anthropologists had simply chosen the smallest-brained and biggest-jawed African skull they could find, and then presented a single drawing as “proof” of what every (Caucasian) observer already “knew” in any case! Tiedemann therefore labored to produce the largest compilation of data ever assembled, with all items based entirely on his own measurements for skulls of all races. (He followed the crude, but consistent, method of weighing the skull, filling the cavity with “dry millet-seed,” weighing again, and finally expressing the capacity of the brain case as the weight of the skull filled with seed minus the weight of the empty skull.)

From his extensive tables (38 male African and 101 male Caucasian skulls, for example—see my later comments on his methods and results), Tiedemann concluded that no differences in size of the brain can distinguish human races. In one of the most important conclusions of nineteenth-century anthropology—a statement, based on extensive data, that at least placed a brake upon an otherwise unchallenged consensus in the opposite direction—Tiedemann wrote:

Finally, Tiedemann closed the logical circle to clinch his argument by invoking the materialist belief of his teacher, F. J. Gall: brain stuff engenders thought, and brain size must therefore correlate at least roughly with intellectual capacity. If the brains of all races differ in neither size nor anatomy, we cannot assert a biological basis for differences in intellect among groups and must, on the contrary, embrace the opposite hypothesis of equality, unless some valid argument, not based on size or structure, can be advanced (an unlikely prospect for scientific materialists like Tiedemann and Gall). Tiedemann writes:

Claims for African inferiority have almost always been based on prejudiced observation of people degraded by the European imposition of slavery: