Macaws, Elephants and Mahouts: Frederic Wood Jones, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Human Biology Project

Abstract

In 1926 the anatomist Frederic Wood Jones toured the United States at the invitation of the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1924 the Foundation had set up a Division of Studies under the leadership of Edwin Embree with the brief to fund programmes under the title of ‘Human Biology’. Grafton Elliot Smith's Rockefeller-funded Institute of Anatomy based at University College London wished to be designated at the centre of the programme and was well placed to provide such leadership. In 1927 the Institute was informed that it had been unsuccessful and the project would be centred in Hawaii under the directorship of the Yale geologist Herbert E. Gregory. This article explores the role of Wood Jones' 1926 trip and the importance of anthropological disputes in that important decision. It also examines the role of Australian anatomy in the development of human biology in the inter-war years.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Warwick Anderson, Lisa O'Sullivan, Cecily Hunter, Tom Rosenbaum and the referees and editors for their advice. I received support from the Australian Research Council (Discovery Project 2009-12, DP0985845).

Notes

¹Wood Jones to Keith, 27 February 1926, Correspondence between Sir Arthur Keith and Frederic Wood Jones, 1905–51, Wood Jones Papers, Royal College of Surgeons Archives, London (subsequently Wood Jones Papers), MS0018/1/37 (all this correspondence is in a bound volume).

²See Alfred Perkins, Edwin Rogers Embree: The Julius Rosenwald Fund, Foundation Philanthropy and American Race Relations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 49–62.

³Wood Jones to Embree, 22 October 1925, RF, 1.1, 401A, 28, 373, Rockefeller Archive Centre, Sleepy Hollow, NY (hereafter RAC).

⁴Minutes of the Rockefeller Foundation, no. 25362, 12/29/25, RF, 1.1, 401A, 28, 373, RAC. Wood Jones was searching for a commercial market for the skins of the animals in the Flinders Chase reserve on Kangaroo Island, off South Australia, as he was keen to prove it to be a financially independent concern. See Kangaroo Island Courier, 9 October 1926, 3.

⁵Perkins, 51.

⁶For example, Daniel Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the Two World Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); David Barker, ‘The Biology of Stupidity: Genetics, Eugenics and Mental Deficiency in the Inter-War Years’, British Journal for the History of Science 22, no. 72, part 1 (1989): 347–75.

⁷For a selected chronology of the discussions about global versus local production of science in the Australian context and the periodisation of Australian science in relation to its imperial roots and connections, see Roy McLeod, ‘On Visiting the ‘“Moving metropolis”: Reflections on the Architecture of Imperial Science’, Historical Records of Australian Science 5, no. 3 (1980): 1–16; R. W. Home and Sally Kohlstedt, ‘Introduction’, in International Science and National Identity: Australia between Britain and America, ed. R. W. Home and Sally Kohlstedt (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991); Roy McLeod, ‘Passages in Imperial Science: From Empire to Commonwealth’, Journal of World History 4, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 117–50; Roy McLeod, ‘Introduction’, Osiris, 2nd series, 15, Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise (2000): 1–13; Suman Seth, ‘Putting Knowledge in Its Place: Science, Colonialism, and the Post-Colonial’, Postcolonial Studies 12, no. 4 (2009): 373–88; Warwick Anderson, ‘From Subjugated Knowledge to Conjugated Subjects: Science and Globalisation, or Postcolonial Studies of Science?’, Postcolonial Studies 12, no. 4 (2009): 389–400.

⁸See David Lambert and Alan Lester, ‘Imperial Spaces, Imperial Subjects’, in Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. David Lambert and Alan Lester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Kate Darian-Smith, Patricia Grimshaw and Stuart MacIntyre, eds, Britishness Abroad: Transnational Movements and Imperial Cultures (Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2007); Brett M. Bennett and Joseph M. Hodge, eds, Science and Empire: Knowledge and Networks of Science across the British Empire, 1800–1970 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

⁹Wood Jones to Keith, 27 February 1926, MS0018/1/37, Wood Jones Papers. The reasons for secret elements of the trip are unclear.

¹⁰ The Register, 22 May 1926, 13.

¹¹Wood Jones to O'Connor, 11 April 1926, RF, 1.1, 401A, 28, 373, RAC. See F. Wood Jones, ‘Lessons Learned Abroad: The Spread of the Eucalypts’, The Register, 8 May 1926, 13; W. H. Anderson, ‘Racial Hybridity, Physical Anthropology, and Human Biology in the Island Laboratories of the United States’, Current Anthropology 53, no S5 (April 2012): S95–S107; S101.

¹³F. Wood Jones, Australia's Vanishing Race (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1934), 2.

¹²See W. Le Gros Clark, ‘Frederic Wood Jones', Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 1 (November 1955): 119–34.

¹⁴Wood Jones to Keith, 14 August 1927, MS0018/1/37, Wood Jones Papers.

¹⁵Wilfrid Le Gros Clark, There Is a Transcendence from Science to Science (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press for the Institute for the Study of Man in Africa, 1965), 2; for Clark's career see Solly Zuckerman, ‘Wilfrid Edward Le Gros Clark. 1895–1971’, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 19 (December 1973): 226.

¹⁶For example, New York Times, 20 December 1925, SM (supplement) 1; 2 May 1926, SM 1; 4 September 1927, xxi. For Keith's visit to the USA in March and April 1915, see Arthur Keith, An Autobiography (London: Watts, 1950), 375–9.

¹⁷E. Embree, ‘Human Biology’, The Scientific Monthly 31, no. 2 (August 1930): 177.

¹⁸Lewis H. Weed, ‘The Anatomist in Medical Education’, Journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges 14, no. 5 (September 1939): 281.

¹⁹Lewis H. Weed, ‘The Anatomist in Medical Education’, Journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges 14, no. 5 (September 1939), 282.

²⁰Woollard had studied medicine in Melbourne and became Wood Jones' successor in the Adelaide chair in 1928, returning to a chair at St Bartholomew's Hospital in 1929 and then, in 1936, succeeding Elliot Smith at University College London.

²¹H. H. Woollard, Recent Advances in Anatomy (London: Churchill, 1927), v–vi. In 1921 Woollard spent a year at the Johns Hopkins medical school courtesy of the Rockefeller Foundation.

²²Wood Jones to Keith, 27 February 1926, MS0018/1/37, Wood Jones Papers.

²³Michael Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 274–312.

²⁴Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876–1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 72; George W. Stocking, ‘Philanthropoids and Vanishing Culture: Rockefeller Funding and the End of the Museum Era in Anglo-American Anthropology’, in Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture, ed. George W. Stocking (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 112–45; Michael O'Hanlon, ‘The Ethnography of Collecting: From Obscurity to Obloquy’, in Hunting the Gatherers: Ethnographic Collectors, Agents and Agency in Melanesia, 1870s–1930s, ed. Michael O'Hanlon and Robert L. Welsch (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004 [2000]), 2; Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, ‘International Exchange in the Natural History Enterprise: Museums in Australia and the United States’, in International Science and National Scientific Identity, ed. Home and Kohlstedt, 121–49.

²⁵F. Wood Jones, 17–18 February, ‘Notes in Museums and Institutions’, c. 100-page unnumbered notepad, Frederic Wood Jones papers, box labelled as Deed box, Royal College of Surgeons of England, London. He added of the Harvard Medical School that it did ‘not repay a visit’. For the interchange between Australian and US museums see Kohlstedt, ‘International Exchange in the Natural History Enterprise’.

²⁶F. Wood Jones, ‘Report of Dr F. Wood Jones 1. New York’, 1, RF, 1.1, 401A, 28, 373, p. 2, RAC (hereafter Report 1).

²⁷Wood Jones, ‘Notes in Museums and Institutions’. The confidential report on Yale for Embree can be found at F. Wood Jones, Report 1, pp. 2–3, RAC. His comments in the notebooks are generally much more critical than those in his final report.

²⁸Wood Jones, ‘Notes in Museums and Institutions’.

²⁹Wood Jones, ‘Notes in Museums and Institutions’.

³⁰Wood Jones, ‘Notes in Museums and Institutions’.

³¹Wood Jones, Report 1, p. 5, RAC.

³²See Robert E. Kohler, All Creatures: Naturalists, Collectors, and Biodiversity, 1850–1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006)

³³See Peter Bowler, Theories of Human Evolution: A Century of Debate 1844–1944 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1986); Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 30, 26. See also Arthur Keith, The Antiquity of Man (London: Williams and Norgate, 1915). For the specimen traffic of Wood Jones with numerous individuals, see Wood Jones Papers; Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For early collectors and their relationships to the scientific centre, see Home and Kohlstedt, ‘Introduction’, 8–10.

³⁶W. K. Gregory to Wood Jones, 19 August 1917, miscellaneous correspondence, MS0017/1/6/3/2–3, Wood Jones Papers. He also attacked him in his monograph on the evolution of teeth, again writing to smooth the waters. Gregory to Wood Jones, 13 July 1922, MS0017/1/6/3/2–3, Wood Jones Papers.

³⁴Perkins, 51–2.

³⁵He wrote extensively on this but the initial work was F. Wood Jones, Arboreal Man (London: Arnold, 1916). For a summary of the dispute see Peter J. Bowler, 119–25; Ross L. Jones, Humanity's Mirror: 150 Years of Anatomy in Melbourne (Melbourne: Haddington, 2007), 145–9.

³⁷From William K. Gregory, 19 August 1917, MS0017/1/6/3/2–3, Wood Jones Papers; from Henry Fairfield Osborn, MS0017/1/11/1/1, Office of the President, American Museum of Natural History, New York, 4 May 1923, Wood Jones Papers.

³⁸Note in Wood Jones' handwriting on the back of Gregory to Wood Jones, 13 July 1922, miscellaneous correspondence, MSS0017/1/6/3/3, Wood Jones Papers.

³⁹Frederic Wood Jones to Arthur Keith, 24 November 1929, MS0018/1/37, Wood Jones Papers. This almost certainly applies to the meeting in 1919 of the Zoological Society in London in which Elliot Smith publicly attacked Wood Jones' Tarsioid Hypothesis (without warning it seems). G. Elliot Smith, Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London (London: Longmans, 1919), 470.

⁴¹Wood Jones to Keith, 27 February 1926, MS0018/1/37, Wood Jones Papers. The main dispute seemed to be about sacral ribs. Wood Jones' tarsian theory must have proved resilient in Gregory's thinking as he wrote a book about evolution based on his refutation of the tarsian theory. See W. K. Gregory, Man's Place amongst the Anthropoids (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934). In it he described Wood Jones as ‘a brilliant anatomist’. A. S. Romer, ‘Review of Man's Place among the Anthropoids’, American Anthropologist 39, no. 4, part 1 (October–December 1937): 703.

⁴⁰Wood Jones, ‘Notes in Museums and Institutions’. He wrote nothing about W. K. Gregory in his confidential report, merely criticising the Hall of Mankind.

⁴²Wood Jones, ‘Notes in Museums and Institutions’, 22–3 February.

⁴³Wood Jones, ‘Notes in Museums and Institutions’, 22–3 February. Lincoln's Inn was the Hunterian Museum in London.

⁴⁴See Michael A. Little and Robert W. Sussman, ‘History of Biological Anthropology’, in A Companion to Biological Anthropology, ed. Clark Spencer Larsen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), 21–2.

⁴⁵‘Anthropological Notes and News: American Association of Physical Anthropologists’, American Anthropologist, new series, 31 (1929): 565; Marta P. Alfonso and Michael A. Little (trans and eds), ‘Juan Comas's Summary History of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (1928–1969)’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, supplement 41 (2005): 163–95.

⁴⁶Wood Jones, Report 1, p. 4, RAC.

⁴⁷W. W. Howells, ‘Adolphe Schultz’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 46, no. 2 (March 1977): 189–95. He also met the famous William H. Welch, whom he described as a ‘fine man’. Wood Jones, ‘Notes in Museums and Institutions’.

⁴⁸Wood Jones, ‘Notes in Museums and Institutions’, 24 February.

⁴⁹B. Malinowski, E. Masson and H .Wayne, eds, The Story of a Marriage: The Letters of Bronislaw Malinowski and Elsie Masson, vol. II 1920–35 (Oxford: Routledge, 1995), 63.

⁵¹Wood Jones to Keith, 27 February 1926; 24 August 1927, MS0018/1/37, Wood Jones Papers.

⁵⁰Wood Jones to Keith, 27 February 1926, MS0018/1/37, Wood Jones Papers. Elliot Smith was from Sydney and Gower Street was the address of the Institute. There is not adequate space to discuss the innervation debate, other than to say it was most vigorously championed by the Sydney anatomist, and Elliot Smith protégé, John Irvine Hunter, who died young whilst visiting Elliot Smith in 1924. See G. C. T. Kenny, ‘H. J. Wilkinson—the Travail of a Pioneer with Muscle’, in Pioneer Medicine in Australia, ed. J. H. Pearn (Brisbane: Amphion Press, 1988), 269–79.

⁵³G. Elliot Smith to Sir Walter Fletcher, January 1926, Andrew Arthur Abbie collection, letters and papers concerning the life and work of Professor Sir Grafton Elliot Smith (1871–1937), Royal Anthropological Institute, London (hereafter Abbie Collection).

⁵⁴Elliot Smith to Embree, 1 December 1926, p. 5, RF, 1.1, 410, 3, 29, RAC.

⁵²Elliot Smith to Embree, 1 December 1926, RF, 1.1, 410, 3, 29, RAC.

⁵⁵Elliot Smith to Embree, 18 June 1927, RF, 1.1, 410, 3, 29, RAC.

⁵⁶See considerable correspondence between President George Vincent, Embree, Elliot Smith and others in 1927. RF, 1.1, 410, 3, 29, RAC.

⁵⁷It would seem that Embree raised this issue when he visited the Institute on 10 December 1926—see Elliot Smith to Embree, 18 December 1926, RF, 1.1, 410, 3, 29, RAC. For his defence of his associate William J. Perry's lack of field experience, see ‘Memorandum on the proposal to establish an ethnological institute’, p. 8, RF, 1.1, 410, 3, 29, RAC.

⁵⁸Elliot Smith wrote to Embree of the funding of Malinowski by the Rockefeller Spellman fund as an ‘amazing action … in subsidising those who are wrecking anthropological study in this country’. Smith to Embree, 14 March 1927, RF, 1.1, 410, 3, 29, RAC. See G. Elliot Smith, B. Malinowski et al., Culture: The Diffusionist Controversy (New York: Norton, 1927).

⁵⁹Wood Jones, ‘Notes in Museums and Institutions’.

⁶⁰Wood Jones, ‘Notes in Museums and Institutions’; this theme occurred in California as well. Wood Jones, ‘Notes in Museums and Institutions’, Saturday 13 March at Anthropological Museum, University of California, San Francisco; see Grafton Elliot Smith, The Diffusion of Culture (London: Kennikat Press, 1971, first edn 1933), 137–50.

⁶³Wood Jones, Report 1, 1–2, RAC.

⁶¹For the uneasy relationship developing between leading biologists in the United States and the eugenics movement throughout the 1920s, see Philip J. Pauly, Biologists and the Promise of American Life: From Meriweather Lewis to Alfred Kinsey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 225–44.

⁶²Frederic Wood Jones, ‘The Changing Point of View’, Joseph Bancroft Memorial Lecture, Brisbane, 5 June 1931, in Life and Living (London: Kegan Paul, 1939), 160.

⁶⁵Wood Jones, Report 1, 1–2, RAC.

⁶⁴Wood Jones, ‘Notes in Museums and Institutions’.

⁶⁶Wood Jones, Report 1, 1.

⁶⁷Benjamin H. Willier, ‘Charles Haskell Danforth 1883–1969’, in Biographical Memoirs, vol. 44 (Washington: National Academy of Sciences, 1974), 1–57.

⁶⁸Datura seeds and Aboriginal hair. Wood Jones to Keith, 12 August 1926, MS0018/1/37, Wood Jones Papers.

⁶⁹Pearl to Wood Jones, February 1926, MS 0017/1/12/3/1–5, Wood Jones Papers. Wood Jones contributed to the first volume of Human Biology, founded by Pearl in 1929. See F. Wood Jones, ‘Some Landmarks in the Phylogeny of the Primates’, Human Biology 1, no. 2 (May 1929): 214–28.

⁷⁰Michael A. Little and Ralph M. Garrut, ‘Raymond Pearl and the Shaping of Human Biology’, Human Biology 82, no. 1 (2010): 77–102.

⁷³Wood Jones, Report 1, RAC. He also criticised the anthropologist J. Howard McGregor of Columbia University, ‘McGregor and his reconstruction work belongs to the “Hall of Man” type of anthropology.’ Wood Jones, Report 1, p. 1, RAC.

⁷¹See Perkins, 50–3. Anderson refutes this. Anderson, ‘Racial Hybridity’, S100–1. See also Robert E. Kohler, Partners in Science: Foundations and Natural Scientists 1900–1945 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 125–9; G. W. Stocking, After Tylor: British Social Anthropology 1888–1951 (London: Athlone, 1996), 393; Adam Stout, Creating Prehistory: Druids, Ley Hunters and Archaeologists in Pre-War Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 96–9.

⁷²E. Embree, ‘Human Biology’, The Scientific Monthly 31, no. 2 (August 1930): 177.

⁷⁴See F. Wood Jones, Australia's Vanishing Race.

⁷⁷Elliot Smith to Seligman, 5 December 1931, Abbie Collection.

⁷⁵Perkins, 58–62.

⁷⁶Anderson, ‘Racial Hybridity’.

⁷⁸Wood Jones to Keith, 5 October 1926, MS0018/1/37, Wood Jones Papers.

⁷⁹Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1982), xvi; Seth, 374.

⁸⁰McLeod, ‘Introduction’, 6–7.

⁸¹Anderson, ‘From Subjugated Knowledge’, 391.

⁸²Anderson, ‘From Subjugated Knowledge’, 394.