ANTHROPOLOGY

A term derived from the Greek to describe a specific science of humankind; its early usage was confused because there were several different views in the nineteenth century of how the contents of that science ought to be defined. In the twentieth century the term was most commonly used as a tacit abbreviation of the phrase ‘‘cultural anthropology’’, describing the comparative study of tribal societies. That discipline had been more usually labeled *ethnology in the nineteenth century, and the present article focusesmore narrowly on what twentieth-century parlance describes as ‘‘physical anthropology’’:

The study of the various biological species belonging to the genus Homo. All but one of those species are now extinct, the remainder being known by courtesy of discoveries in *palaeontology, but those alleged to be ancestral to Homo sapiens are of intense interest in the context of the theory of *evolution and its opposition by the doctrine of *creationism.Eighteenth-century descriptions of the great apes were still rather sketchy, the ‘‘ourang-outan/primate from kalimantan (BORNEO)’’

Remaining mysterious and the gorilla virtually unknown. But a new description of the former published in Petrus Camper’s ‘‘Account of the Organs of Speech in the Orang Outang’’ (1779) greatly interested James Burnet, Lord Monboddo, who was in the process of producing an account ‘‘Of the Origin and Progress of Language’’ (1779–1799); Monboddo’s reflections on the question of whether or not the ‘‘orang utan’’ should be classified as human were satirically reflected by Thomas Love Peacock in Melincourt; or, Sir Orang Haut-Ton (1817). Orang-utans and other great apes were, however, rudely expelled from the register of human types by early anthropologists—a move obliquely echoed by Edgar Allan Poe’s account of the perpetrator of '‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’’ (1841).