conformations of the cranium as symptomatic of conduct, although he allowed himself to take exception when the Scotsman assured him that the love which couples felt for each other was a defect and a source of unhappiness. Gall s fifth letter to L’Etincelle de la révolte was on superstition, that is to say, on the Church of O Senhor de Bonfim, which pilgrims had filled with ex-votos, with legs, hands, arms, heads, breasts, and eyes of wood and crystal, asking for miracles or giving thanks for them. The sixth letter was on the advent of the Republic, which in aristocratic Bahia had meant only the change of a few names. In the next one, he paid homage to four mulattoes—the tailors Lucas Dantas, Luiz Gonzaga das Virgens, João de Deus, and Manoel Faustino—who, a century before, inspired by the French Revolution, had formed a conspiracy to destroy the monarchy and establish an egalitarian society of blacks, half-breeds, and whites. Jan van Rijsted took Galileo to the little public square where the four artisans had been hanged and quartered, and to his surprise saw him leave some flowers there.
Amid the shelves of books of the Livraria Catilina, Galileo Gall made the acquaintance one day of Dr. Jose Batista de Sá Oliveira, an elderly physician and the author of a book that had interested him: Comparative Craniometry of the Human Types of Bahia, from the Evolutionist and Medico-Legal Point of View . The old man, who had been to Italy and met Cesare Lombroso, whose theories fascinated him, was happy to learn that he had at least one reader of this book that he had published at his own expense and that his colleagues considered extremely odd. Surprised at Gall’s knowledge of medicine—albeit continually disconcerted and frequently shocked by his opinions—Dr. Oliveira found in the Scotsman an excellent conversational partner, with whom on occasion he spent hours heatedly discussing the physical mechanisms of the criminal personality, biological inheritance, or the university, an institution that Gall railed against, regarding it as responsible for the division between physical and intellectual labor and hence the cause of worse social inequalities than aristocracy and plutocracy. Dr. Oliveira took Gall on as an aide in his medical practice and occasionally entrusted him with a bleeding or a purge.
Although they sought out his company and perhaps respected him, neither Van Rijsted nor Dr. Oliveira had the impression that they really knew this man with the red hair and beard, shabbily dressed in black, who, despite his ideas, appeared to live a tranquil life: sleeping late, giving language lessons at his pupils’ homes, tirelessly walking about the city, or spending entire days in his garret reading and writing. Sometimes he disappeared for several weeks without telling them beforehand, and when he reappeared they discovered that he had been off on one of the long trips that took him throughout Brazil, in the most precarious circumstances. He never spoke to them of his past or of his plans, and since he gave them the vaguest of answers when they questioned him regarding them, the two of them resigned themselves to accepting him for what he was or what he appeared to be: an exotic, enigmatic, eccentric loner, whose words and ideas were incendiary but whose behavior was innocuous.
After two years, Galileo Gall spoke Portuguese fluently and had sent off several additional letters to L’Etincelle de la révolte . The eighth, on the corporal punishments that he had witnessed being administered to bond servants in the streets and the public squares of the city, and the ninth, on the instruments of torture employed in the days of slavery: the rack, the stocks, the neck chain or gargalheira , metal balls attached to the ankles, and infantes , rings to crush the thumbs. The tenth, on O Pelourinho, the municipal whipping post where lawbreakers (Gall called them “brothers”) were still flogged with rawhide whips, which were for
Amid the shelves of books of the Livraria Catilina, Galileo Gall made the acquaintance one day of Dr. Jose Batista de Sá Oliveira, an elderly physician and the author of a book that had interested him: Comparative Craniometry of the Human Types of Bahia, from the Evolutionist and Medico-Legal Point of View . The old man, who had been to Italy and met Cesare Lombroso, whose theories fascinated him, was happy to learn that he had at least one reader of this book that he had published at his own expense and that his colleagues considered extremely odd. Surprised at Gall’s knowledge of medicine—albeit continually disconcerted and frequently shocked by his opinions—Dr. Oliveira found in the Scotsman an excellent conversational partner, with whom on occasion he spent hours heatedly discussing the physical mechanisms of the criminal personality, biological inheritance, or the university, an institution that Gall railed against, regarding it as responsible for the division between physical and intellectual labor and hence the cause of worse social inequalities than aristocracy and plutocracy. Dr. Oliveira took Gall on as an aide in his medical practice and occasionally entrusted him with a bleeding or a purge.
Although they sought out his company and perhaps respected him, neither Van Rijsted nor Dr. Oliveira had the impression that they really knew this man with the red hair and beard, shabbily dressed in black, who, despite his ideas, appeared to live a tranquil life: sleeping late, giving language lessons at his pupils’ homes, tirelessly walking about the city, or spending entire days in his garret reading and writing. Sometimes he disappeared for several weeks without telling them beforehand, and when he reappeared they discovered that he had been off on one of the long trips that took him throughout Brazil, in the most precarious circumstances. He never spoke to them of his past or of his plans, and since he gave them the vaguest of answers when they questioned him regarding them, the two of them resigned themselves to accepting him for what he was or what he appeared to be: an exotic, enigmatic, eccentric loner, whose words and ideas were incendiary but whose behavior was innocuous.
After two years, Galileo Gall spoke Portuguese fluently and had sent off several additional letters to L’Etincelle de la révolte . The eighth, on the corporal punishments that he had witnessed being administered to bond servants in the streets and the public squares of the city, and the ninth, on the instruments of torture employed in the days of slavery: the rack, the stocks, the neck chain or gargalheira , metal balls attached to the ankles, and infantes , rings to crush the thumbs. The tenth, on O Pelourinho, the municipal whipping post where lawbreakers (Gall called them “brothers”) were still flogged with rawhide whips, which were for
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