Free The Hunt for the Golden Mole by Richard Girling Page A

called their science ‘anthropometry’, and began to speak of ‘breeds’.
    In 1900, William Z. Ripley’s anthropological field guide, The Races of Europe , identified among others the Old Black Breed, the Sussex, the Anglian, the Bronze Age Cumberland, the Neolithic Devon, the Teutonic-Black Breed Cross, the Inishmaan and the Brunet Welsh. Like breeds of dog, sheep or cattle, they all had their defining characteristics. Some were dark; others pale. Some had woolly hair; others fair and fine. Some tended to plumpness; others were thin and wiry. All were shown like prize livestock, staring into the distance with empty eyes. To a modern viewer they look more like criminal mugshots – an observation with which I suspect Ripley, then an assistant professor of sociology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, would not have been displeased.
    He noted with evident approval that members of the aristocracy tended to be blond and tall, whereas the old British types, with their big ugly noses, wide mouths, heavy cheekbones and ‘overhanging pent-house brows’, were coarse and rugged. Noses in particular could speak more eloquently than their owners. According to Bishop Whately in his Notes on Noses , the typical British type was ‘anti-cogitative’, as if the size of the nose were in inverse proportion to the size of the brain. Ripley believed that in the proportion, moulding and texture of flesh, bone and hair he could read every nuance of a human breed’s pedigree and character.
    Few if any pent-house brows were raised at this, for hisviews fitted snugly within the Victorian mainstream. The august British Association for the Advancement of Science had its own Anthropometric Committee, whose paper of 1883, ‘defining the facial characteristics of the races and principal crosses in the British Isles’, had been of great use to William Z. Ripley. The benchmark was Crania Britannica , a vast survey of ancient British skulls by two professional craniologists, Joseph Barnard Davis and John Thurnam. This had been published in 1856 and, by her own ‘very liberal permission and favour’, was dedicated to ‘Her Most Gracious Majesty, Victoria’. In the manner of the time, Davis and Thurnam combined meticulous record-keeping with wild assertion. For the people-watchers of the Victorian empire, racial classification was not just a matter of physical differentiation – height, weight, pigmentation, shape and size of skull – but of psychological, intellectual and moral values too. Hence the belief that lunatics and criminals, like foreigners, could be identified by application of a tape measure to the frontal, parietal and occipital regions of the skull. ‘It would appear,’ reported one celebrated Victorian anthropologist, ‘that dark eyes and black or very dark hair are more common among lunatics than among the general population.’
    All too clearly now we can see where this was heading. In less than fifty years, the hobby-science of Victorian country vicars brought us to Hitler’s master race and the greatest catastrophe of modern history. Among the incidental casualties of war was the use of anthropometrics as a study of living populations. No longer could we talk innocently of ‘race’ and ‘blood’. Racial history was not just politically incorrect; it was politically unthinkable. It was also, for the most part, just plain wrong. Brutes, after all, are beings akin to ourselves. For all the suffering he caused, and for all the contradictions of his own example,Hagenbeck’s thinking has a resilient kernel of usefulness. Whether or not we assign moral equivalence to other species, there is virtue in caring. The commodification of animal life, the casual dispensation of unfelt cruelty, kicks open the door to barbarism. If we value the measurable above the infinite, then we lose sight of what it is that makes us human. The