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Macaws, Elephants and Mahouts:Frederic Wood Jones, the RockefellerFoundation and the Human BiologyProjectDr Ross L. Jones aa University of SydneyPublished online: 31 May 2013.

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Macaws, Elephants and Mahouts: Frederic WoodJones, the Rockefel ler Foundat ion and the Human

Biology Project

ROSS L. JONES

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.

ON THE EVENING OF 27 FEBRUARY 1926 Frederic Wood Jones, Professor of

Anatomy at the University of Adelaide in South Australia, wrote from the Hotel

McAlpin in New York to his teacher, the eminent British anatomist, Sir Arthur

Keith:

I have had a wonderful time in the States so far, and have met with the greatest kindness

from all the men with whom I have come in contact. I seem to have a better reputation in

America than I have in London, and I think I have learned more in three weeks here than

I have in a very long while elsewhere.1

Wood Jones was in the middle of a trip that took him from the east to west coasts

of the United States and then on to Hawaii. The Rockefeller Foundation had

funded this excursion, at the behest of Edwin Embree, who, from 1925, was the

Director of the Foundation’s short-lived Division of Studies. Embree had spent a

year based in the Pacific, formulating the outlines of the Human Biology

Project*an initiative he instigated in 1924 as the centrepiece of this new

division.2 Late in 1925 Embree had written to the Vice-Chancellor of the

University of Adelaide informing him that he would be visiting the university

later that year, and asking to be shown their work on the Australian Aborigine.

* I would like to thank Warwick Anderson, Lisa O’Sullivan, Cecily Hunter, Tom Rosenbaum and thereferees and editors for their advice. I received support from the Australian Research Council(Discovery Project 2009-12, DP0985845).1 Wood 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).

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

ISSN 1031-461X print/1940-5049 online/13/020189-17# 2013 Taylor & Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1031461X.2013.791706189

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Wood Jones replied to Embree on behalf of the university outlining the work he

was doing in relation to ‘the biological study of the Australian native’ as well as

informing him that he would be in Europe when Embree visited South

Australia.3 Upon receiving Wood Jones’ letter, Embree telegraphed the Rock-

efeller Foundation requesting that Wood Jones receive a travel grant of $1,200

out of the $20,000 allocated in 1926 in the Division of Studies budget for the

‘project of study of Australian aborigines’ in order for him to ‘visit institutions

and confer with us’.4

Wood Jones’ visit to the United States occurred at a critical time in the

development of research fields and interests that would ultimately shape the

discipline of human biology. His brief involved consultations with leading

biologists working in genetic and eugenic research, physical and cultural

anthropologists, physiologists and anatomists. The 1920s saw significant devel-

opments in the understanding of immunology, neurology, surgery, physiology,

genetics and psychology, and Embree saw his Human Biology Project as

addressing many of the problems that had arisen as scientists attempted to

further understand the human body. Embree hoped his project would create a

synthesis of emerging biomedical knowledge, especially in relation to future

population levels and health.5 While this revolution amongst biologists (most

particularly geneticists) has been extensively written about (especially in

relation to the eugenics movement), the role of anatomists has been largely

overlooked, even though anatomy continued to dominate non-clinical medical

education for decades in terms of the allocation of resources and time.6 This

article examines the role of Wood Jones’ 1926 trip in relation to plans for the

Human Biology Project, and analyses the function of anatomy more generally in

the developing understanding of human biology.

Wood Jones’ impressions, conveyed in his confidential report to the

Rockefeller Foundation (as well as in his notebook), allow an insight into

disciplinary developments in this critical period; make possible a re-evaluation of

the role of the discipline of anatomy in the evolution of the understanding of

human biology; and reveal the way in which the movement of anatomical

expertise from the Pacific to the Atlantic world influenced biological scientists to

develop a twentieth-century model of what it meant to be human. Also,

retracing Wood Jones’ trip allows us to examine the state of the academic

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

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

5 Perkins, 51.6 For 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 andMental Deficiency in the Inter-War Years’, British Journal for the History of Science 22, no. 72, part 1(1989): 347�75.

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discipline of anatomy at this time and its relation with the development of

anthropology or race science. For Wood Jones, human anatomy and anthro-

pology were inseparable. Furthermore, this trip raises new and interesting

considerations within the scholarly literature concerned with the development

and transfer of scientific knowledge.7 What role, if any, did Australian

experiences and data play in the development of Wood Jones’ intellectual

world-view, and in what way, through him, did they influence the development

of contemporary biological theory in the United States? Wood Jones’ journey

illuminates the syntheses, ambiguity and conflict developing between two

distinct and rapidly developing traditions in anatomy and anthropology: it was

contemporaneous with a transformative moment in a scientific discipline.

Understanding the significance of this trip adds to the growing literature

uncovering the complex interplay within the British Empire-Commonwealth,

especially between home country and colony as well as between the wider

scientific worlds of the Atlantic and the Pacific.8

Why Wood Jones?

Although Wood Jones disingenuously claimed to Keith that it was ‘a wonderful

thing to do a tour like this entirely financed by a Foundation that has no interest

in me and expects nothing from me in return’,9 he, in fact, provided a broad-

ranging confidential report for Embree. Wood Jones became involved in a

number of discussions concerning funding for anthropology in Australia,

including the creation of a new Chair of Anthropology at the University of

Sydney, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Wood Jones was himself invited

to take up the new Rockefeller Chair of Physical Anthropology at the University

of Hawaii in the year following his tour. On his way to the United States, Wood

7 For a selected chronology of the discussions about global versus local production of science in theAustralian context and the periodisation of Australian science in relation to its imperial roots andconnections, see Roy McLeod, ‘On Visiting the ‘‘‘Moving metropolis’’: Reflections on theArchitecture 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 ofWorld 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 Knowledgein 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 andGlobalisation, or Postcolonial Studies of Science?’, Postcolonial Studies 12, no. 4 (2009): 389�400.

8 See David Lambert and Alan Lester, ‘Imperial Spaces, Imperial Subjects’, in Colonial Lives across theBritish 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 StuartMacIntyre, eds, Britishness Abroad: Transnational Movements and Imperial Cultures (Melbourne:Melbourne University Publishing, 2007); Brett M. Bennett and Joseph M. Hodge, eds, Science andEmpire: Knowledge and Networks of Science across the British Empire, 1800�1970 (Basingstoke: PalgraveMacmillan, 2011).

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

Jones: Macaws, Elephants and Mahouts 191

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Jones spent time in the United Kingdom where he wrote for the Adelaide

Register that his aim was to ‘learn what I could of the methods of conducting

faunal reserves and the best means of ensuring the continued life of our native

animals and plants’. He then told his readers that ‘in America it was my business

to make study of the manner in which an indigenous race, disposed by the white

invader, might be best preserved and studied’.10 Of his three-week tour, he was

to spend one week in New Mexico visiting the Navajo and Zuni, with the rest

devoted to museums and medical schools. At the conclusion of the tour, after

leaving San Francisco, he met Embree at his home on Oahu.11

Even though Wood Jones had been practising his science far from the centre

of empire, he was one of a small group of anatomists who forged a distinctive

path for anatomy in Britain and its colonies after the death of Thomas Henry

Huxley in 1895. Wood Jones had a peripatetic career, travelling and collecting

anatomical material throughout the Pacific and Southeast Asia and China. By

1926 he had been Professor of Anatomy at the University of Adelaide in South

Australia for seven years, during which time he relentlessly explored the

outback and offshore islands of South Australia, completing a magnum opus on

the mammals of South Australia and developing and publishing his maverick

anti-Darwinian theories of evolution and the origins of humanity.12 Wood

Jones’ lengthy Australian sojourn (fifteen years in total) greatly influenced his

Lamarckism, convincing him that individuals could pass on acquired character-

istics to the next generation, a proposition denied by the dominant contempor-

ary Darwinist thinkers, thus placing him firmly in the unfashionable

environmentalist camp. He told a radio audience in 1934 that:

Intelligence is an attribute that permits an individual to adjust itself correctly to the

changing demands of its environment, and it is useless to attempt to establish a simple

criterion, by which the intelligence of a nomadic stone-age hunter and of a white

politician may be measured and contrasted.13

In 1927, after eight years in Adelaide, he wrote to Keith: ‘Do you still fight? I ask

this because I get . . .more and more convinced of the certainty of the reality of

the inheritance and [of] (even trivial) ‘‘acquired’’ characters.’14

Some forty years after Wood Jones’ anatomical progress through North

America, Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark, perhaps the greatest British figure in post-

World War Two anatomical circles, wrote that when he was contemplating an

academic career after World War One he chose anatomy because of ‘three great

anatomists of the time, a sort of triumvirate of the anatomical world; Arthur

10 The Register, 22 May 1926, 13.11 Wood 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 theUnited States’, Current Anthropology 53, no S5 (April 2012): S95�S107; S101.

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

13 F. Wood Jones, Australia’s Vanishing Race (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1934), 2.14 Wood Jones to Keith, 14 August 1927, MS0018/1/37, Wood Jones Papers.

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Keith, [Grafton] Elliot Smith and [Frederic] Wood Jones’.15 All three had

significant American connections. Arthur Keith had a high profile in the press in

the United States, being a prolific contributor to major newspapers on a range of

anatomical topics, and the Australian Grafton Elliot Smith was only able to

pursue his grand anatomical project at University College London after World

War One courtesy of Rockefeller funding.16 It was no accident that Wood Jones’

trip covered such a broad spectrum of disciplines and interests, as the developing

British tradition of anatomy, championed by Wood Jones, Keith and Elliot

Smith, mirrored Embree’s eclectic project. Thus Wood Jones had the expertise to

both critique and advise those involved in the project’s development*he had, in

Embree’s words, become a ‘biological statesman’.17

Anatomy in transition

Anatomy had been undergoing a transformation within the medical school

curricula since the end of the nineteenth century. Anatomists in the two major

English-speaking traditions were re-imagining their discipline in light of rapid

developments not only in medical science but also in the nascent discipline of

human biology. The American anatomist, Lewis Weed, as Dean of the Medical

School at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, hosted Wood Jones’ visit on 24 February.

In a lecture in 1939, he claimed that traditionally: ‘From the strict derivation of

the word, anatomy would seem to be restricted to the cutting apart of finished

total structures.’18 Weed claimed, however, that contrary to this approach the

best definition had been provided by the Australian anatomist, Herbert

Woollard, in Recent Advances in Anatomy. Weed paraphrased Woollard approv-

ingly, describing anatomy simply as ‘the subject matter on which anatomists are

working’.19 Woollard’s catalogue of the parts of modern anatomy covered a

variety of topics from microdissection to cell biology and neuro-anatomy.20 He

added that there were also ‘interesting and important matters’*such as ‘racial

and constitutional anatomy, anthropology . . . large areas of comparative anat-

omy [and] much embryology’.21 Wood Jones supported such an extended

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

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

17 E. Embree, ‘Human Biology’, The Scientific Monthly 31, no. 2 (August 1930): 177.18 Lewis H. Weed, ‘The Anatomist in Medical Education’, Journal of the Association of American Medical

Colleges 14, no. 5 (September 1939): 281.19 Ibid., 282.20 Woollard 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.

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

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definition of his discipline but was concerned by what he saw as the fracturing of

many of the traditions of anatomical teaching that he observed in American

schools. Yet, along with Grafton Elliot Smith, he was convinced of the need to

develop a new anatomy that attempted to encompass an assortment of

disciplines, but with traditional dissection of the human body at the centre.22

Anatomy in the museum

The museum had played a central role in the development of the discipline of

anatomy, as well as giving it considerable exposure in the public mind.23 By the

1920s, however, museums were ceding their research pre-eminence in natural

history to universities.24 In many respects the museum sat at a major

intersection of anatomical and anthropological studies. Wood Jones discovered

the complexities of that relationship in the United States and noted the decline

of some museums as vibrant research institutions. When visiting Harvard he

bemoaned the condition of the Warren Museum, as, he wrote in his notes ‘the

place shows signs of bad neglect’.25 The Peabody, however, impressed him: ‘Very

fine, well-arranged collections. Tozzer, Dixon, Hooton and Shapiro all work at a

school of anthropology that I should suppose is as good a training ground as

could be had.’26 For Wood Jones, the museum had become a problematic site for

developing a new ‘human biology’.

At both Harvard and Yale, Wood Jones was much more interested in

spending time with the anthropologists; in fact throughout the trip he seems to

have spent more time with anthropologists and archaeologists interested in

American civilisations than with human anatomists. At Harvard he examined a

series of Copan slate casts with Alfred Tozzer, and at Yale he met with the

geologist-anthropologist Herbert Gregory. His visit to Yale’s Peabody Museum of

22 Wood Jones to Keith, 27 February 1926, MS0018/1/37, Wood Jones Papers.23 Michael Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century

America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 274�312.24 Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876�1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1998), 72; George W. Stocking, ‘Philanthropoids and Vanishing Culture: RockefellerFunding 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 WisconsinPress, 1985), 112�45; Michael O’Hanlon, ‘The Ethnography of Collecting: From Obscurity toObloquy’, 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 inAustralia and the United States’, in International Science and National Scientific Identity, ed. Home andKohlstedt, 121�49.

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

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

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Natural History with George McCurdy and Richard S. Lull was a disappoint-

ment, unlike its namesake at Harvard, as the museum contained much that was

of ‘tawdry triviality’ and the taxidermy was, in his opinion ‘very poor indeed’.27

Six days later, Philadelphia proved to be even worse. Wistar’s Institute had ‘a

very fine series of complete human skeletons’ which was ‘unused’.28 The

Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences was an institution ‘with what I should

suppose some of the greatest treasures in America all jumbled up and mostly

unstudied. Very crowded and poor exhibition methods. Great wealth of

ethnological material. This includes Morton’s collection of skulls.’29 These, he

claimed, were ‘not well cared for’ and in two cases were wrongly labelled,

including one labelled a ‘Tasmanian’ which he believed was ‘almost certainly

not’. It was, he claimed, a ‘recent skull negroid, with unworn teeth’.30 In his

report to Embree he wrote that ‘anthropology as such is dead or dying here’.31

It was, however, difficult to discount museums, especially for such an avid

collector as Wood Jones. Important biological scientists still held museum

appointments and the circulation of specimens, both human and animal, could

only occur through the agency of such institutions. The entire Human Biology

Project, as envisaged by Elliot Smith and Wood Jones, was completely

dependent on the circulation of specimens through scholarly channels, most

importantly museums.32 It was impossible for comparative anatomists to carry

out the project to morphologically map the arrival of modern humanity,

subsequent to the transformation of the discipline into a Darwinian evolutionary

project by Huxley, without a rich supply of primate and other mammalian

specimens. Wood Jones was both a significant supplier and recipient of such

material, although not in the submissive sense of many early collectors in

outposts.33

If the museums were a disappointment, the personalities associated with

them often proved problematic. Wood Jones’ meeting with William King

Gregory (with whom he regularly exchanged specimens) on 27 February

1926, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, was destined

to be difficult. Gregory was a leading Darwinist, secretary of the hard-line

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

28 Wood Jones, ‘Notes in Museums and Institutions’.29 Ibid.30 Ibid.31 Wood Jones, Report 1, p. 5, RAC.32 See Robert E. Kohler, All Creatures: Naturalists, Collectors, and Biodiversity, 1850�1950 (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2006)33 See 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 ofCalifornia Press, 2008), 30, 26. See also Arthur Keith, The Antiquity of Man (London: Williams andNorgate, 1915). For the specimen traffic of Wood Jones with numerous individuals, see WoodJones Papers; Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For early collectors and their relationships tothe scientific centre, see Home and Kohlstedt, ‘Introduction’, 8�10.

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eugenicist Galton Society, and one of those who may have been responsible for

suggesting the Human Biology Project to Embree.34 Wood Jones had gained

early notoriety for his arboreal theory of human evolution, as it placed the

origins 60 million years in the past*well before the estimate of most Darwinian

anthropologists*as well as identifying the Southeast Asian Tarsiers as the root of

human evolution, thus bypassing apes and monkeys.35 Gregory, amongst many,

had attacked this theory in a number of works, writing to Wood Jones in 1917

that he hoped that his remarks would be taken

cum grano, for surely you must know in your heart, in spite of any reviewer, that you

have turned out a book of distinct value and timeliness*and one which will very likely

be used gladly . . .where evolution as well as descriptive zoology and anatomy is [sic]

studied.36

He then suggested that they exchange specimens and information, which they

did.37 Wood Jones responded positively to these attacks, writing to Gregory in

1922, ‘please do not think that I am the sort of man who objects to criticism . . . I

have recently gone for you in a lecture I gave in Brisbane at the invitation of

Longman’.38 A different sentiment was evident in an aside that Wood Jones

made when writing to Keith about Elliot Smith in 1929, ‘if Elliot Smith had

refrained from his nasty methods with me I would not have been at the trouble

to hunt out his inconsistencies in his own special field. The same applies to

[William King] Gregory � a shallow fellow’.39

After spending the day at the American Museum of Natural History, Wood

Jones noted that Gregory ‘could not stand the ordinary exam given to a first year

medical student’.40 He wrote to Keith that night that:

W.K. Gregory had no idea of the development of the normal human sacrum and he fairly

astonished me, because the New York School carries such an air of dogmatism and

34 Perkins, 51�2.35 He 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.

36 W. 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 writingto smooth the waters. Gregory to Wood Jones, 13 July 1922, MS0017/1/6/3/2�3, Wood JonesPapers.

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

38 Note 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.

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

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

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assurance . . . I think that W. K. Gregory and his school at the New York Museum

disappointed me most.41

This meeting highlights the different paths being taken in the American and

British traditions. The lack of essential human anatomical knowledge became an

important complaint Wood Jones expressed in his US tour. As American

comparative anatomists became more specialised, the broad training of

conservative gross anatomists was increasingly discarded.

Wood Jones complained constantly about the disappearance of traditional

anatomical training. He had been impressed with the National Museum in

Washington in the previous week, where he was hosted by the important

anthropologists Gerret Miller and Ales Hrdlicka. He wrote that:

Hrdlicka has the finest collection of osteological material I have seen: and out and out the

finest series of brains*better than Lincoln’s Inn by far*13 gorilla brains & about twice as

many orangs. A very large series of uncommon marsupials & at least 3 Tarsius.42

Wood Jones was, however, much more impressed with Miller who, he wrote,

had ‘a far more plastic mind . . . and is a very good thinker*far better logical

thinker than Hrdlicka’.43

Anthropology

The growing specialisation of anatomists and anthropologists in the United

States created new opportunities. It was around the time of Wood Jones’ visit

that American physical anthropologists began to form stronger institutions to

distinguish themselves from cultural anthropologists. The original membership

of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, established in 1928,

was composed of a majority of anatomists, and the first meeting of the

Association in Charlottesville, Virginia was in conjunction with the American

Association of Anatomists.44 Of the founding committee of the society, four of

the seven (Ales Hrdlicka, Fay-Cooper Cole, Charles Danforth and William

Gregory) had hosted Wood Jones’ tour.45 Embryology was also an important

tool for the human biologist and of particular interest to Wood Jones. When

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

42 Wood Jones, ‘Notes in Museums and Institutions’, 22�3 February.43 Ibid. Lincoln’s Inn was the Hunterian Museum in London.44 See 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.

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visiting Johns Hopkins Medical School (‘the finest I have seen’),46 he was

particularly taken by the work on foetuses of the recently appointed Professor of

Physical Anthropology, Adolph Schultz. Schultz was later to succeed Hrdlicka as

the second President of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.47

A little over a week later, when visiting the University of Chicago, Wood Jones

attended the anthropology class of Fay-Cooper Cole with Edward Sapir, the

doyen of American Indian languages (described by Wood Jones as a ‘good man’),

and was impressed with the large numbers in the class (150). He noted that

there was a ‘greater demand for anthropology in American Universities’, but he

returned to the complaint that the ‘physical side [was] neglected and not catered

for in the Anatomy School’.48 Two weeks after leaving Chicago, after visiting

reservations in New Mexico, he arrived in San Francisco. Again, after visiting

museums, meeting anthropologists and anatomists, and attending a seminar

presented by the visiting Bronislaw Malinowski, he complained about the lack of

teaching of gross anatomy and the poor state of the museums.49

Macaws, elephants and mahouts

Although critical of their inadequacies as human anatomists, it seems that one

particular attraction many American anthropologists and archaeologists had for

Wood Jones was their apparent growing opposition to much of the work coming

out of Elliot Smith’s Institute of Anatomy at University College London. In his

letter to Keith from New York, Wood Jones commented that he found ‘that the

reputation of the Sydney-cum-Gower Street school is at about zero, what with

elephants, sympathetic innervation, Taungs and other things, they are rather

scientifically suspect just now’,50 and later:

It is now quite evident that E[lliot] S[mith]’s dicta on the general situation in Australia

were not taken at their face value, and though I have only listened, and not chipped in, I

merit there is a note of doubt in the Rockefeller mind about the entire disinterestedness of

the recommendation from that source.51

46 Wood Jones, Report 1, p. 4, RAC.47 W. 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’.

48 Wood Jones, ‘Notes in Museums and Institutions’, 24 February.49 B. 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), 63.50 Wood 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 discussthe innervation debate, other than to say it was most vigorously championed by the Sydneyanatomist, and Elliot Smith protege, John Irvine Hunter, who died young whilst visiting ElliotSmith in 1924. See G. C. T. Kenny, ‘H. J. Wilkinson*the Travail of a Pioneer with Muscle’, inPioneer Medicine in Australia, ed. J. H. Pearn (Brisbane: Amphion Press, 1988), 269�79.

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

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Elliot Smith’s ambition knew no bounds and the announcement of the

Rockefeller Human Biology Project led him to apply for a significant portion of

the money for the interdisciplinary Institute he had founded.52 In January 1926

he wrote to Sir Walter Fletcher, a physiologist in charge of the Medical Research

Council in the UK in the inter-war years:

You are aware that the Rockefeller Foundation has established a new Department which

they call ‘Human Biology’, which is only a euphemism for Anthropology, a discredited

word which they do not want to make use of . . . The determination of the policy of the

new Department of the Foundation will be largely influenced by [Embree’s] report of

the impressions he gets, and it is probable that he will come here next October to spend

the Winter with us here thrashing out a plan of campaign which will be world-wide in its

scope. It is essentially an Anglo-British scheme, in all probability with headquarters in

London.53

Later in 1926 he wrote to Embree explaining that:

we have been endeavouring to rescue Physical Anthropology from becoming mere

anthropometry, and bring back the subject more definitely to the domain of biology

where it properly belongs. Mankind must be studied as a problem of General Biology and

in close connexion with Embryology, Physiology and Psychology.54

Elliot Smith’s hopes were dashed, however, and none of the funding available

through Embree’s project went to his Institute of Anatomy. He considered

resigning, as he wrote to Embree, faced with ‘the accomplished fact of the

shipwreck of the anthropological schemes for the attainment of which we have

devoted so much time and thought since 1924’.55

There are a number of reasons why Elliot Smith’s scheme was rejected. First,

Rockefeller correspondence indicates that the provost of University College was

cool on the idea of Elliot Smith expanding the anthropological side of the

Institute*probably because Elliot Smith had bypassed him.56 Embree was keen

on fieldwork and, apart from some early work in Egypt and a few trips, Elliot

Smith’s anthropology was essentially of the ‘armchair’ style, which he

vigorously defended in letters to Embree.57 It thus infuriated Elliot Smith that

his greatest academic opponent, Malinowski (a keen proponent of fieldwork

being at the heart of anthropology), was funded by the Rockefeller at this time

52 Elliot Smith to Embree, 1 December 1926, RF, 1.1, 410, 3, 29, RAC.53 G. 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), RoyalAnthropological Institute, London (hereafter Abbie Collection).

54 Elliot Smith to Embree, 1 December 1926, p. 5, RF, 1.1, 410, 3, 29, RAC.55 Elliot Smith to Embree, 18 June 1927, RF, 1.1, 410, 3, 29, RAC.56 See considerable correspondence between President George Vincent, Embree, Elliot Smith and

others in 1927. RF, 1.1, 410, 3, 29, RAC.57 It 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 hisassociate William J. Perry’s lack of field experience, see ‘Memorandum on the proposal toestablish an ethnological institute’, p. 8, RF, 1.1, 410, 3, 29, RAC.

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(although not through the Human Biology Project).58 Whether or not the

Foundation would have funded such a large anthropological project at that time

at all is doubtful, but there were, as Wood Jones pointed out to Keith, three

important planks of Elliot Smith’s work that were coolly received in the United

States*Piltdown, Taung and the sympathetic innervation of muscle. Elliot

Smith was the most important anatomist who championed the Piltdown skull,

whilst Taung was the first fragment of an australopithecine skeleton discovered

by another of Elliot Smith’s students, the Australian Raymond Dart, in South

Africa, again in 1924. Wood Jones, and many of those whom he visited in the

United States, believed that Taung was an ape, not a proto-human. For example,

when visiting Washington, Wood Jones noted that: ‘Both H[rdlicka] & Miller are

convinced that Piltdown jaw does not belong to skull. Both are sure Taung is

only an anthropoid’.59

The reference in Wood Jones’ letter of 27 February to Keith to elephants (see

above) concerns Elliot Smith’s relentless championing of the hyper-diffusionist

argument that all civilisation emanated from Egypt, and that the evidence of this

in South America could be seen in the representation of elephants in various

bas-reliefs. Virtually all American anthropologists argued that Elliot Smith’s

South American ‘elephants’ were, in reality, schematic macaws. At Harvard with

Tozzer, Wood Jones noted that:

The slate on which 2 ‘elephants’ were present has not been cast; but I saw photographs

and drawings of it & and have no doubt at all that there is no evidence that they are

elephants and agree that they are the macaw . . .& that the mahouts are merely

incidental.60

Although Wood Jones was broadly committed to a model of anatomy much like

that practised at Elliot Smith’s Institute, clearly disagreements over many issues

undermined their intellectual and personal relationship.

Genetics and eugenics

Another important part of Wood Jones’ itinerary was the contact he made with

leading biologists*mostly with significant attachments to the eugenics move-

ment.61 Throughout his life Wood Jones expressed concern at the growing

58 Elliot Smith wrote to Embree of the funding of Malinowski by the Rockefeller Spellman fund asan ‘amazing action . . . in subsidising those who are wrecking anthropological study in thiscountry’. 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).

59 Wood Jones, ‘Notes in Museums and Institutions’.60 Wood Jones, ‘Notes in Museums and Institutions’; this theme occurred in California as well.

Wood Jones, ‘Notes in Museums and Institutions’, Saturday 13 March at AnthropologicalMuseum, University of California, San Francisco; see Grafton Elliot Smith, The Diffusion of Culture(London: Kennikat Press, 1971, first edn 1933), 137�50.

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

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specialisation of the biological sciences and their isolation from fieldwork. He

wrote in 1939 that ‘the present day scientist . . . [was] a clean shaven, hard-faced,

somewhat inhumane person, who, cloistered in a laboratory, holds a test tube to

the light and sees in it Nature’s profoundest secrets’.62 His Lamarckism also put

him at odds with hard-line eugenicists. When in New York at the commence-

ment of his trip he visited Columbia University to inspect the research on

chromosomes. He wrote to the Rockefeller that:

the work of T. H. Morgan is, of course, classic, and for anyone capable of adjusting values

extremely useful, but it must be remembered that it is highly specialized and must be

taken as part of a scheme of things and not as the whole of things.63

He was interested in the work in genetics at Cold Springs Harbour, and was

driven by Charles Davenport to the laboratory on Saturday 20 February. With

Davenport and Henry Laughlin he went over ‘colour vision & music’, and also

inspected Alfred Blakeslee’s datura experiments. On departing, Davenport

presented him with the ‘forms used for surveys and papers published &

recommended the . . . books for general purposes in any possible Australian

investigation’.64 He wrote for the Rockefeller that:

The whole department run on splendid lines and the methods of measuring psychical as

well as physical factors all available as well as proper methods for recording and for the

final working out of problems. Davenport, Blakeslee, Riddle, Banta and Loughlin all took

the greatest trouble to explain methods. The best place to learn systematized methods for

dealing with a living population. Thoroughly ‘chromosome’ in theories.65

As an antidote for all the genetics and hard-line Darwinism he had absorbed,

he was taken on the following Saturday to lunch at the Century Club in New

York by Henry Edward Crampton, a fellow Lamarckian and naturalist whom he

admired greatly. Crampton was, according to Wood Jones, ‘one of the sanest

correctives to the pure ‘‘chromosome school’’ which is currently dominating

American thought in evolution’.66 Wood Jones concluded his American journey

at Stanford on 16 March, collecting salamanders with the anatomist, eugenicist

and geneticist who established the idea of equilibrium in gene pools, Charles H.

Danforth.67 Wood Jones cemented his meetings by sending material back to

both Cold Springs Harbour and Stanford after he returned to Adelaide.68

Raymond Pearl hoped Wood Jones would be able to visit him during his time in

Baltimore, writing that: ‘For many years past I have read your work with the

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

63 Wood Jones, Report 1, 1�2, RAC.64 Wood Jones, ‘Notes in Museums and Institutions’.65 Wood Jones, Report 1, 1�2, RAC.66 Ibid., 1.67 Benjamin H. Willier, ‘Charles Haskell Danforth 1883�1969’, in Biographical Memoirs, vol. 44

(Washington: National Academy of Sciences, 1974), 1�57.68 Datura seeds and Aboriginal hair. Wood Jones to Keith, 12 August 1926, MS0018/1/37, Wood

Jones Papers.

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greatest interest and profit, and have long wanted to meet you. It will be a real

pleasure to see you here’.69 The meeting would have been intriguing as Pearl’s

project mirrored that of Embree and he became a leading light in the ongoing

study of human biology.70

Conclusion

Wood Jones’ trip to the United States in 1926 offers insights into a number of

aspects of the development of the understanding of human biology in the 1920s.

Embree’s decision to fund Wood Jones’ trip may to some degree clarify the

various positions taken by scholars about the reasons for the establishment of

the Rockefeller Human Biology Project and clarify Embree’s intentions for the

project. It has been suggested that the Galton Society, headquartered at the

American Museum of Natural History in New York under the benevolent

stewardship of Henry Fairfield Osborn, provided a major stimulus to the project,

initially inspiring Embree to back a multidisciplinary study of what they claimed

were the most primitive people extant: the Australian Aborigine. Perkins

suggests that there was originally a strong eugenic element to the project due

to the encouragement provided to Embree by the Galton Society, particularly

Charles Davenport, W. K. Gregory and Clarke Wissler.71 Embree, like many

middle-class intellectuals of the time, held views that could be classified under

the broad rubric of eugenics, including the restriction on the right to reproduce

for inferior members of society.72 Although an expert on Australia, Wood Jones,

a Lamarckian, was known to be ambivalent about social Darwinian ideas and

would have been an unusual choice for any committed eugenicist, especially

those connected to the Galton Society. At the end of his trip, Wood Jones

provided a report to Embree containing a scathing attack on Osborn’s overtly

eugenic Hall of Mankind (which had been established in time for the Second

International Eugenics Congress in 1921):

anyone interested or trained in anthropology may safely be trusted to estimate the value

of the ‘Hall of Man’ type of dogmatism . . . there are three entirely different human

69 Pearl to Wood Jones, February 1926, MS 0017/1/12/3/1�5, Wood Jones Papers. Wood Jonescontributed 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.

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

71 See 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 ofChicago 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 andArchaeologists in Pre-War Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 96�9.

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

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phylogenics exhibited in this hall, and where the comparative anatomy of man is dealt

with none of these phylogenics is adhered to.73

Wood Jones was to later use his embryological and anthropometric studies to

attack the notion of the Australian Aboriginal being physically and intellectually

primitive.74 Embree, or the Rockefeller Foundation, clearly did not, however,

withdraw support and admiration for Wood Jones as a result of his stance.

By mid-1927 Embree’s grand Human Biology Project had essentially been

scuppered by internal politics within the Rockefeller Foundation and he left to

pursue his career elsewhere, although elements of the project continued under

different guises.75 Wood Jones, Elliot Smith and Keith continued their projects

but without the aid of the cross-national funding and organisational umbrella of

Embree’s project. One offspring of the project was the work on race mixing

carried out by Herbert Gregory at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu.76 Elliot

Smith wrote to the psychologist and anthropologist Charles Seligman on 5

December 1931 concerning the Anthropological Institute in London and the

term ‘Human Biology’:

With reference to the term ‘Human Biology’, which you attribute to Radcliffe-Brown, I

think the term was invented by Embree at the time he was secretary of the Rockefeller

Foundation in 1924. In that year I went to Australia on behalf of the Foundation to

discuss with the Federal Government and the Universities the proposal to create a

Department of Anthropology in Sydney and devise a scheme of fieldwork with money

provided by the Rockefeller Foundation. When I returned to New York in order to report

the result of my Australian mission I had a conference with Embree and Gregory of Yale

(who spends half his time as the Director of the Museum of Honolulu and is the Organiser

of Pacific Research as far as the Americans are concerned) in the course of which we

considered how our new move in Australia could be integrated with Anthropological

teaching and research elsewhere in the world; and it was out of the discussions that the

term ‘Human Biology’ emerged, I think at Embree’s suggestion. I presume you know a

good deal about the circumstances under which the 1927 scheme we formulated was

torpedoed, which had the strange result that Yale took the general idea, and with money

provided by Mr Harkness developed the scheme of their Institute of Human Relations

which is hardly the sort of thing Embree and I contemplated. However, this is a rather

painful subject.77

Six months after returning from his tour of the US, Wood Jones wrote to

Keith:

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

74 See F. Wood Jones, Australia’s Vanishing Race.75 Perkins, 58�62.76 Anderson, ‘Racial Hybridity’.77 Elliot Smith to Seligman, 5 December 1931, Abbie Collection.

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I have been offered a job at the University of Hawaii under the Rockerfeller [sic]

Foundation to do racial research in Hawaii. Of course you know all the racial mixture

going on and the great field for physical anthropology and racial anatomy. Since they are

offering me 7,500 dollars and a five years appointment . . . I have accepted.78

In terms of the development and transmission of scientific knowledge, Wood

Jones’ trip to the United States in 1926 illustrates the discipline of anatomy at a

moment of transformation owing to the rapid development of medical science

and the need for traditional anatomy to find accommodation in the curriculum.

Both the US and British Empire traditions attempted to expand the very

meaning of the discipline but in different ways. Anatomy was traditionally a

science with a descriptive, morphological methodology; practitioners such as

Wood Jones and many of his American hosts saw no conflict in its essential

integration with, amongst other disciplines, anthropology and race science. The

debate between the Lamarckian Wood Jones and his eugenicist hosts occurred

within its disciplinary boundaries. As Stepan has written, ‘The scientists who

gave scientific racism its credibility and respectability were often first rate

scientists struggling to understand what appeared to them to be deeply puzzling

problems of biology and human society’.79

In addition, various models have been proposed for the dispersion of science

from a Eurocentric base to colonial outposts. The Rockefeller’s choice of Wood

Jones to provide them with a survey critique of the state of anatomy and

anthropology in the United States created a discourse between Australian and

Atlantic ideas of race and human biology*a movement of ideas and expertise

through cross-hemisphere boundaries. Does this trip confirm McLeod’s predic-

tion, stated a decade ago, that ‘It is likely that much new insight awaits the

study . . . of the transmission of science across different spaces’,80 and does it to

some degree obey Anderson’s edict and help to dissolve ‘fatuous distinctions

between centre and periphery’?81

It needs to be emphasised that Wood Jones was originally asked to

undertake the journey to the United States owing to his ‘biological study of

the Australian native’. His Australian expertise meant as much as his British

anatomical pedigree. Australian matters were clearly important in Embree’s

Human Biology Project. Wood Jones’ contribution to the Human Biology Project

meant that the centre of international anatomical expertise moved, for a

moment, towards the Antipodes. This was because the Atlantic discipline of

anatomy was transformed in Australia, creating a distinctly Australian hybrid

discipline. That is, anatomy as a discipline was influenced as a result of

Australian anatomists, such as Elliot Smith, moving north and also as a

consequence of the effects of the unique antipodean environment on those,

78 Wood Jones to Keith, 5 October 1926, MS0018/1/37, Wood Jones Papers.79 Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800�1960 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books,

1982), xvi; Seth, 374.80 McLeod, ‘Introduction’, 6�7.81 Anderson, ‘From Subjugated Knowledge’, 391.

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such as Wood Jones, who came south to practise anatomy. The interaction of

Atlantic and Antipodean anatomy changed both. It is, therefore, possible to see

the contribution of Wood Jones to the Human Biology Project as an illustration

of McLeod’s proposition of the ‘moving metropolis’, in which science was not

transmitted to the colonies (subsequently producing an attenuated local version)

but rather evolved due to the appearance of new centres of expertise at the

periphery, which then enlivened and advanced the received paradigm at the

centre. Alternatively, his influence could perhaps be better understood as part of

the organic and symbiotic relationship between scientists at ‘home’ and the

colonies, therefore being part of what Anderson described as ‘the situated

production of globality’.82

The role assigned to Wood Jones by various important figures in biology and

medicine in this period forces us to question the lack of interest displayed by

historians in the role of traditional anatomy in the development of the

twentieth-century idea of what it was to be human. Wood Jones’ role in

Embree’s Human Biology Project greatly expands the scope of previous ideas

about the development of human biology in the inter-war years, adding as it

does a distinct southern perspective to what has been essentially an Atlantic

story*also giving ‘body’ to the narrative by reinstating the discipline of

anatomy in the centre of the creation of the modern body.

Dr Ross L. Jones

University of Sydney

Email: s.ckenny@bigpond.com

82 Ibid., 394.

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