[2] Camper's main points in his first lecture were that classical drawing lessons from the time of Vitruvius, including the teachings of Dürer and Perreault, were based on an incorrect assumption that the human head was oval at all ages, and he proceeded to prove this with his dimensions of the skulls.

The travelogues of Plinius and de Buffon made mention of practises in infancy which caused these national characteristics, such as Chinese women pulling their eye lids to the sides, or African Moors pressing their noses flat, or Europeans pressing their ears flat with caps tied tight.

Camper's work was later quoted again and again, and his engraved drawings were used to prove that he had tried to show a hierarchy of facial angles from the orangutan to the European, but this was never part of either of the two lectures.

In fact, he was only trying to help artists make better portraits, and remarked that of all the great masters of art that can be observed in engravings such as Rubens, van Dyk, and Jordaans only the Haarlemmer Cornelis Visscher had ever been able to draw the head of a Moor correctly.

Camper claimed that both edges of the spectrum were monsters, which is to say that orangutans and apes (with facial angle 42-50 degrees) were just as ugly as Sophocles' Medusa engraved in profile by Bernard Picart for Philipp von Stosch's "Pierres Antiques Gravées".