Anatomies: A Cultural History of the Human Body by Hugh Aldersey-Williams Page B

Fingerprints had occasionally been used, like the other measurements made by Bertillon, as a means of disproving a suspect’s connection with a crime. But now Galton saw that fingerprinting was actually a far more powerful technique that could be used for catching criminals. In 1902, Rose Guilder, a parlourmaid, noticed a thumbprint in new paintwork following a burglary in the house where she worked. It was the first time that fingerprint evidence was brought to court. Galton, meanwhile, pursued his own research agenda, collecting thousands of prints in a futile hope that he might be able to use them to demonstrate people’s relatedness.
    Galton held an ardent admiration for his cousin Charles Darwin. (Possibly it is not a coincidence that among his many books is one titled Hereditary Genius .) But where Darwin studied the animal kingdom, Galton focused on his fellow man. And woman. Travelling through Africa with a party of missionaries as a young man in 1850, he was startled to observe the wife of one of the party’s interpreters, ‘a charming person, not only a Hottentot in figure, but in that respect a Venus among the Hottentots’. Naturally, he wished to obtain her measurements. But there was a difficulty. ‘I did not know a word of Hottentot, and could never therefore have explained to the lady what the object of my footrule could be.’ He dared not ask the interpreter to negotiate for him. Yet there she was, ‘turning herself about to all points of the compass, as ladies who wish to be admired usually do’. Then Galton realized that his instruments held the solution to his dilemma. He picked up his sextant and, standing at a respectable distance, recorded ‘her figure in every direction, up and down, crossways, diagonally, and so forth, and I registered them carefully upon an outline drawing for fear of any mistake; this being done, I boldly pulled out my measuring tape, and measured the distance from where I was to the place she stood, and having thus obtained both base and angles, I worked out the results by trigonometry and logarithms’.
    In 1884, Galton set up a laboratory at the International Health Exhibition held at South Kensington in London, and gathered data from volunteering visitors on their ‘Keenness of Sight and of Hearing; Colour Sense, Judgment of Eye; Breathing Power; Reaction Time; Strength of Pull and of Squeeze; Force of Blow; Span of Arms; Height, both standing and sitting; and Weight’. He used the new technique of photography to make ‘composite’ portraits, layering up individual exposures to produce a supposed average. In this way, he sought – vainly, again – to distill the typical appearance of many diverse populations. All in all, Galton’s anthropometric project was far-reaching, and we shall hear more from him in later chapters.
    Scientists do not need misleading syntheses like Galton’s composites, but they do need typical specimens. Zoologists keep one specimen of every animal, which they call the holotype of the species. It is the benchmark against which other specimens are compared to see if they belong to that species or some other. The scientist who first described the species has the privilege of selecting the holotype. These holotypes are scattered through the university museums of the world.
    So where is the human holotype? For that matter, who is the human holotype? Oddly, there isn’t really one. This is partly because holotypes are only a designated requirement for species described since 1931, and partly because there is no scientific ambiguity about membership of the human species. (Racists might disagree, but their objections arise in large part because different races can interbreed, which demonstrates our common humanity.) In 1959, however, the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus was nominated for the position, even though he had been dead for 181 years. Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae of 1758 introduced the nomenclature for species that we still use today,