Paul Topinard

[8] Patrick Brantlinger says that ... the spell of craniology, phrenology, physiognomy, and other attempts to quantify racial inequalities by physical measurement hovers over ...the ethnological and anthropological debates of the mid- and late-Victorian eras.

These attempts expressed a materialist determinism, strongly associated with scientific explanation, that underscored the inevitability of the extinction or extermination of the "lower races" by the "higher" ones in "the struggle for existence".

He calculated the capacity of various skulls by pouring substances into them and then noting the volume consumed, on the assumption that a larger space for a brain equated to a more developed intellect.

He also believed that such measurements could be tracked through the evolution of the human species and that a larger cranial capacity was therefore related to a greater degree of civilisation.

Charles Loring Brace has recently studied skulls used originally by Topinard in his experiments and believes that there is a fundamental flaw in the theory because the Congolese and West African examples represented people who were physically much smaller overall.