Observations sur les Variations Musculaires dans les Races Humaines

Abstract

THIS posthumous work of Chudzinski is a laborious and systematic attempt to open up quite a new field of anthropological investigation. It may be said, with perfect truth, that the study of the various races of mankind has been superficial and empirical; observations hitherto have been confined to features, colour of skin, size of body, proportion of limbs and bone measurements. With the exception of the late Prof. Giacomini of Turin, Chudzinski is practically the only man that ever went beneath the skin to discover the real and essential features that separate one race of man from another. There is no desire here to minimise the value of the few briefly recorded dissections, made on dark-skinned waifs that have died in Europe, and found scattered in the anatomical literature of the present century; the observations on the brains of negroid races by Parker, Broca, Gratiolet, Waldeyer, Marshall, Tiedemann, Calori and Barkow are good so far as they go, dissections of individual specimens made by Flower and Murie, Cuvier and Turner, are efforts in a right direction, but the merit of having opened up a systematic investigation of the anatomy of the races of mankind, taking a group of individuals to represent the race, remains to Chudzinski and Giacomini. This treatise is a record of the muscles of ten negroes, five negresses, five individuals belonging to yellow-skinned races, contrasted with the muscles of six individuals of a white-skinned race.

Observations sur les Variations Musculaires dans les Races Humaines.

Par Théophile Chudzinski. Memoires de la Société d'Anthropologie de Paris, Ser. 3; t. ii.; fasc. 2. (Paris, 1898.)