WITHIN the span of the nineteenth century a number of ancient and long established phenomena disappeared from the scene of Western civilization such as cavalry officers, the Holy Roman Empire and the ...

The 18th-century German anatomist Johann Blumenbach kept a collection of 250 human skulls, but he found one particularly enchanting. “My beautiful typical head of a young Georgian female,” he wrote, ...

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (Figure 9.7) was the most influential and widely read naturalist at the turn of the nineteenth century. His dissertation, De generis humani varietate nativa, was published ...