The Flamingo’s Smile

by Stephen Jay Gould

  To plug the largest perceived gap at the other end of the scale—that between apes and humans (although it seems smaller to us today)—White employed the same poor arguments. He did not bother to establish unity of design (even an ape’s biggest detractor could not deny anatomical similarity with humans). Instead, he tried to raise the status of apes while lowering the worth of supposedly inferior people. Using bad analogies (or transferring human concepts to animal behavior), he argued that baboons assign sentinels to watch over their sleeping herds by night. In an amusing passage, and on the theme of simple misinformation, White elevated orangutans by arguing that they willingly submit to that most enlightened of contemporary medical practices—bloodletting: “When sick, these animals have been known to suffer themselves to be blooded, and even to invite the operation; and to submit to other necessary treatment, like rational creatures.” Then, in a double whammy designed to raise apes and debase black humans, he portrayed the simians as both slavers and sexual abusers (ever so human, if not particularly admirable):

  They have been known to carry off negro-boys, girls, and even women, with a view of making them subservient to their wants as slaves, or as objects of brutal passion: and it has been asserted by some, that women have had offspring from such connections.

  Having thus established the chain as a finely nuanced sequence embracing all living things, White proceeded to the major subject of his treatise: the ranking of human races in a single order with his own group on top. For more than 100 pages, structure after structure and organ after organ, White strives mightily to arrange the races as a single sequence. The effort was an intellectual struggle involving the uncomfortable fit of recalcitrant data into a predetermined scheme; for differences among races cannot easily be linearized, no matter how strong one’s a priori commitment to such an arrangement. Moreover, when we force characters into single sequences, we cannot always establish the same directions for each character—blacks may exhibit less of some admirable qualities than whites, but whites will surely rank lower for other features. How did White deal with these inconsistencies and threats to his system?

  I can make most sense of White’s efforts by arranging his discussions of particular features into four categories—and by noting that only one comfortably matches his preferred scheme of a single chain rising from “lower” animals to “inferior” races (African blacks at the bottom and Orientals in the middle) and finally to European whites at the summit. The first category includes admirable traits possessed in greater quantity by whites, lesser by blacks, and still less by beasts. For example, using some dubious measures (for human races do not differ substantially in the size of their brains, as if it mattered), White argued that blacks occupied an intermediate position in a heterogeneous sequence of brain size, ranging from birds to dogs to apes and finally through “lower” human races to white Europeans (see figure of White’s diversely cobbled chain of being above). But only this category among his four affirmed White’s presuppositions. The other three imposed distinct and pressing problems in interpretation. White, however, was equal to the task.

  Charles White’s heterogeneous version of the chain of being. Note particularly the “ascent” of human races to the abstract ideal of Greek statuary. FROM WHITE, 1799. REPRINTED FROM NATURAL HISTORY.

  The second category includes those admirable traits that, to White’s embarrassment, are more abundantly distributed among black people. White dealt with this dilemma by arguing that, although the traits must be deemed valuable, beasts are even better endowed—so the sequence still runs from beast to black to white. He writes: “In these last particulars the order is changed, the European being the lowest, the African higher, and the brute creation still higher in the scale.” Blacks, for example, sweat less than whites—a seeming advance in refinement (although White assures us that blacks have a stronger body odor than Caucasians). White comments:

  Captains and Surgeons of Guinea ships, and the West India planters, unanimously concur in their accounts, that negroes sweat much less than Europeans; a drop of sweat being scarcely ever seen upon them. Simiae sweat still less, and dogs not at all.

  Similarly, black females have less copious menstruation—a clear increment in daintiness over whites. But most apes bleed even less or not at all. Blacks excel whites in memory, but lower animals are the all-time champs; elephants truly never forget. Indeed, White manages to degrade anything admirable about blacks by attributing more of the same to lower animals. Blacks, he claims for example, tolerate pain better than whites. He cites a colleague who wrote:

  They bear surgical operations much better than white people; and what would be the cause of insupportable pain to a white man, a negro would almost disregard. I have amputated the legs of many negroes, who have held the upper part of the limb themselves.

  But think of how many lower animals—insects in particular—bear dismemberment without an apparent whimper.

  The third category includes bestial features possessed more strongly by whites than blacks, but even more intensely by lower animals—the most direct and evident exception to White’s preferred order. Whites, for example, have a fuller beard and more copious body hair than blacks, while most mammals are fully covered with a dense pelage. White wriggles out of this problem with a rhetorical device and a claim that the noblest of animals have flowing hair, like the copious locks of European whites!

  The fine, long, flowing hair appears to be given for ornament. The Universal Parent has bestowed it upon but few animals, and those of the noblest kind—upon man, the chief of the creation—upon the majestic lion, the king of the forest—and upon that most beautiful and useful domestic animal, the horse.

  In the final category, blacks possess more of apparently bestial features than whites, so all seems well—until we realize that beasts are the least endowed of all. Black males, for example, have larger penises than whites, while black females have larger breasts—sure signs of an indecent and unbridled sexuality. (White even reports that “the Hottentot women have long flabby breasts; and that they can suckle their children upon their backs by throwing the breasts over their shoulders.”) But apes have smaller penises and breasts than any group of humans. White found no adequate solution to this problem and simply made an end run around it, commenting in passing that at least black women and apes develop the largest nipples!

  At this point, and after 100 pages of assiduous listing, White’s argument lies in a shambles—despite all his heroic efforts to patch it up, as documented in the foregoing discussion. Therefore, following all the old adages about putting the best face upon adversity, he ends with a rhetorical flourish and with a blatant appeal to that ultimate subjectivity—aesthetic criteria. After all, don’t we all know that white people are more attractive and pleasing to God and man—and that’s ultimately that. Thus, in a final roulade and in a famous paragraph often quoted for its unintended humorous effect, White ends his argument with the following paean to European beauty:

  Ascending the line of gradation, we come at last to the white European; who being most removed from the brute creation, may, on that account, be considered as the most beautiful of the human race. No one will doubt his superiority of intellectual powers; and I believe it will be found that his capacity is naturally superior also to that of every other man. Where shall we find, unless in the European, that nobly arched head, containing such a quantity of brain, and supported by a hollow conical pillar, entering its center? Where the perpendicular face, the prominent nose, and round projecting chin? Where that variety of features, and fulness of expression; those long, flowing, graceful ringlets; that majestic beard, those rosy cheeks and coral lips? Where that erect posture of the body and noble gait? In what other quarter of the globe shall we find the blush that overspreads the soft features of the beautiful women of Europe, that emblem of modesty, of delicate feelings, and of sense? Where that nice expression of the amiable and softer passions in the countenance; and that general elegance of features and co
mplexion? Where, except on the bosom of the European woman, two such plump and snowy white hemispheres, tipt with vermillion?

  I don’t mean to diminish the posthumous humor of this passage—“snowy white hemispheres tipt with vermillion” as the ultimate mark of human perfection, indeed! White’s flowery style may render him more subject to ridicule than most of his contemporaries, but his argument is no worse or different from many of theirs. He was merely expressing a common opinion of his time in admittedly overblown rhetoric. The static chain of being, as Lovejoy argues, had formed a cornerstone of Western interpretations of nature for centuries, despite its evident difficulties in application to a recalcitrant world full of gaps and copious variation not easily ordered into single sequences.

  So have a good chuckle at the appropriate parts, but then ponder the larger and serious issue for a moment. Evolution drove the static chain of being into obsolescence—therefore, we may easily, in retrospect, identify its evident flaws and analyze the falseness and inconsistency of argument used to defend it. But how many of our own cherished beliefs, the ones that we never doubt because we think that they map nature in an obvious way, will seem centuries hence just as foolish and ideologically bound as the static chain of being? Should we not examine the logic and verisimilitude of our own deepest convictions? At least we may avoid the ridicule of future generations by steering clear of sexual anatomy and leaving to the great biblical poets of the Song of Songs any metaphorical description of the human breast.

  19 | The Hottentot Venus

  I HAD A LITTLE FRIEND in nursery school. I don’t even remember her name. But I do recall some secret advice that I offered her one day at the playground. I told her that the enormous surrounding creatures known as adults always looked up when they walked, and that we little folk would therefore find all manner of valuable things on the ground if only we kept our gazes down. Were my paleontological predispositions already in evidence?

  Carl Sagan and I both grew up in New York, both interested in biology and astronomy. Since Carl is tall and chose astronomy, while I’m short and chose paleontology, I always figured that he’d be looking up (as he did with some regularity in hosting his TV series Cosmos), while I’d be sticking to my old but good advice and staring at the ground. But I one-upped him (literally) last month in Paris.

  A few years back, Yves Coppens, professor at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, took Carl on a tour of the museum’s innards. There, on a shelf in storage, they found the brain of Paul Broca floating in Formalin in a bell jar. Carl wrote a fine essay about this visit, the title piece of his book Broca’s Brain. A few months ago, Yves took me on a similar tour. I held the skull of Descartes and of our mutual ancestor, the old man of Cro-Magnon. I also found Broca’s brain, resting on its shelf and surrounded by other bell jars holding the brains of his illustrious scientific contemporaries—all white and all male. Yet I found the most interesting items on the shelf just above. Perhaps Carl never looked up.

  This area of the museum’s “back wards” holds Broca’s collection of anatomical parts, including his own generous and posthumous contribution. Broca, a great medical anatomist and anthropologist, embodied the great nineteenth-century faith in quantification as a key to objective science. If he could collect enough human parts from enough human races, the resultant measurements would surely define the great scale of human progress, from chimp to Caucasian. Broca was not more virulently racist than his scientific contemporaries (nearly all successful white males, of course); he was simply more assiduous in accumulating irrelevant data, selectively presented to support an a priori viewpoint.

  These shelves contain a ghoulish potpourri: severed heads from New Caledonia; an illustration of foot binding as practiced upon Chinese women—yes, a bound foot and lower leg, severed between knee and ankle. And, on a shelf just above the brains, I saw a little exhibit that provided an immediate and chilling insight into nineteenth-century mentalité and the history of racism: in three smaller jars, I saw the dissected genitalia of three Third-World women. I found no brains of women, and neither Broca’s penis nor any male genitalia grace the collection.

  The three jars are labeled une négresse, une péruvienne, and la Vénus Hottentotte, or the Hottentot Venus. Georges Cuvier himself, France’s greatest anatomist, had dissected the Hottentot Venus upon her death in Paris late in 1815. He went right to the genitalia for a particular and interesting reason, to which I will return after recounting the tale of this unfortunate woman.

  In an age before television and movies made virtually nothing on earth exotic, and when anthropological theory assessed as subhuman both malformed Caucasians and the normal representatives of other races, the exhibition of unusual humans became a profitable business both in upper-class salons and in street-side stalls (see Richard D. Altick’s The Shows of London, in the bibliography, or the book, stage, and screen treatments of the “Elephant Man”). Supposed savages from faraway lands were a mainstay of these exhibitions, and the Hottentot Venus surpassed them all in renown. (The Hottentots and Bushmen are closely related, small-statured people of southern Africa. Traditional Bushmen, when first encountered by Europeans, were hunter-gatherers, while Hottentots were pastoralists who raised cattle. Anthropologists now tend to forgo these European, somewhat derogatory terms and to designate both groups collectively as the Khoi-San peoples, a composite word constructed from each group’s own name for itself.) The Hottentot Venus was a servant of Dutch farmers near Capetown, and we do not know her actual group membership. She had a name, though her exploiters never used it. She was baptized Saartjie Baartman (Saartjie, or “little Sarah” in Afrikaans, is pronounced Sar-key).

  Hendrick Cezar, brother of Saartjie’s “employer,” suggested a trip to England for exhibition and promised to make Saartjie a wealthy woman thereby. Lord Caledon, governor of the Cape, granted permission for the trip but later regretted his decision when he understood its purposes more fully. (Saartjie’s exhibition aroused much debate and she always had supporters, disgusted with the display of humans as animals; the show went on, but not to universal approbation.) She arrived in London in 1810 and immediately went on exhibition in Piccadilly, where she caused a sensation, for reasons soon to be discussed. A member of the African Association, a benevolent society that petitioned for her “release,” described the show. He first encountered Saartjie in a cage on a platform raised a few feet above the floor:

  On being ordered by her keeper, she came out…. The Hottentot was produced like a wild beast, and ordered to move backwards and forwards and come out and go into her cage, more like a bear on a chain than a human being.

  Yet Saartjie, interrogated in Dutch before a court, insisted that she was not under restraint and understood perfectly well that she had been guaranteed half the profits. The show went on.

  After a long tour of the English provinces, Saartjie went to Paris where an animal trainer exhibited her for fifteen months, causing as great a sensation as in England. Cuvier and all the great naturalists of France visited her and she posed in the nude for scientific paintings at the Jardin du Roi. But she died of an inflammatory ailment on December 29, 1815, and ended up on Cuvier’s dissecting table, rather than wealthy in Capetown.

  Why, in an age deluged with human exhibitions, was Saartjie such a sensation? We may offer two answers, each troubling and each associated with one of her official titles—Hottentot and Venus.

  On the racist ladder of human progress, Bushmen and Hottentots vied with Australian aborigines for the lowest rung, just above chimps and orangs. (Some scholars have argued that the earliest designation applied by seventeenth-century Dutch settlers—Bosmanneken, or “Bushman”—was a literal translation of a Malay word well known to them—Orang Outan, or “man of the forest.”) In this system, Saartjie exerted a grim fascination, not as a missing link in a later evolutionary sense, but as a creature who straddled that dreaded boundary between human and animal and thereby taught us something about a self still present, although sub
merged, in “higher” creatures (see essays 17 and 18).

  Contemporary commentators emphasized both the simian appearance and the brutal habits of Bushmen and Hottentots. In 1839, the leading American anthropologist S.G. Morton labeled Hottentots as “the nearest approximation to the lower animals…. Their complexion is a yellowish brown, compared by travellers to the peculiar hue of Europeans in the last stage of jaundice…. The women are represented as even more repulsive in appearance than the men.” Mathias Guenther (see bibliography) cites an 1847 newspaper account of a Bushman family displayed at the Egyptian Hall in London:

  In appearance they are little above the monkey tribe. They are continually crouching, warming themselves by the fire, chatting or growling…. They are sullen, silent and savage—mere animals in propensity, and worse than animals in appearance.

  And the jaundiced account of a failed missionary in 1804:

  The Bushmen will kill their children without remorse, on various occasions; as when they are ill shaped, or when they are in want of food, or when obliged to flee from the farmers or others; in which case they will strangle them, smother them, cast them away in the desert or bury them alive. There are instances of parents throwing their tender offspring to the hungry lion, who stands roaring before their cavern, refusing to depart before some peace offering be made to him.