Charles H. Crane in a memorandum of September 1868, was "to aid the progress of anthropological science by obtaining measurements of a large number of skulls of the aboriginal races of North America." For that purpose, it was necessary "to procure sufficiently large series of adult crania of the principal Indian tribes to furnish accurate average measurements." 12[1]
The articles relating to Indian archeology and anthropology, received along with the skulls and skeletons, belonged more appropriately in the Museum of Natural History, administered by the Smithsonian Institution. Professor Joseph Henry, Secretary of the Smithsonian, accordingly proposed to Surgeon General Barnes an exchange of the Smithsonian's anatomical materials for the Medical Museum's materials relating to the manners and customs and the archeology of the Indian tribes. The Surgeon General agreed, and over the next several years numerous exchanges were effected.
The craniological collection was to have been the most important feature of a proposed catalog of the anatomical section of the Museum, to accompany the catalogs of the surgical, medical, and microscopical sections. In a letter of 18 January 1873, to the Honorable John Coburn, chairman of the House Committee on Military Affairs, Surgeon General Barnes strongly urged such a catalog as "simply a necessity" to make the collections accessible to students. "Anthropologists in different parts of the world," he wrote, "are anxious for the data * * * for comparison with similar data published in Sweden, Russia, Germany, Italy, France, and England. The French Government, through its Legation here, after making repeated applications for the tables of cranial measurements, employed an artist to make casts and take photographs of a series of typical skulls; and a professor of Bonn made the study of the collection the object of a trip across the Atlantic."
The Military Affairs Committee reported favorably on the bill authorizing the publication of the catalog at a cost for 1,000 copies estimated at $26,200, but the bill was not passed and the catalog was not published. 13[2]
After some 30 years of medically unfruitful measurement of the cubic capacity, the length and breadth, the facial angle, and other characteristics of skulls, it was decided that such determinations pertained more properly to anthropology than to medical study. On 8 May 1898, therefore, the Museum's
