The Mismeasure of Man

Mustard seed poured into a skull, then tipped out and measured: this is where the ranking of humankind starts, with Samuel Morton filling the cranial cavities of his Philadelphia collection and arriving, tally by tally, at an order of the races that put his own at the summit. Gould went back to Morton's raw numbers a century and a half later and found no fraud at all, only a scrupulous man's expectations resting quietly on the scale, which is the more frightening finding.