For Douglas,
craniology offered little about the human state, and it was not until the 1890s that anthropological scholars began sorting humans by language and cultural context, not by skull shape and size.
Wishing to remove herself from an embarrassing situation, the distraught Linda tries to phones Allan's friend, Geoffrey Fisher (John Pankow), a researcher in
craniology, who is absent from his office.
Bertillon pointed out that his methods were based on Quetelet's binomial curve and also identified his activities with those of Paul Broca, who had steered anthropology in a medical direction which made use of quantification with his statistical
craniology.
Racism and anti-Semitism also permeated biology and `racial science' textbooks which aimed to point out to children the distinctions between the `Aryan' race and `inferior' races, for example, by means of
craniology. There were also readers, such as The Poisonous Mushroom (1938), in which a whole array of anti-Semitic imagery was used.
For more see Stephen Jay Gould, "Measuring Heads: Paul Broca the Heyday of
Craniology," in The Mismeasure of Man, (New York, 1981), 73-112; Anne Harrington, Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought (Princeton, 1987), 87-90.
Faced with this situation, physical anthropology can use mutually supporting data from
craniology, serology, odontology, or dermatology to affirm the physical unity of the nation.
Marlow's pre-voyage head measurements are statistics for an ominous
craniology experiment, certainly.