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 ...

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 ...

The scientific name for the common chimpanzee is Pan troglodytes, a label created in 1775 by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. He chose the word troglodyte with deliberation; it comes ...

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, ...