Broca's Brain - Carl Sagan [4]
But there was another area of the museum still more remote, a strange mix of active research and virtually abandoned cabinets and shelves. A reconstructed and articulating skeleton of an orangutan. A vast table covered with human skulls, each neatly indexed. A drawer full of femurs, piled in disarray, like the erasers in some school janitor’s supply closet. A province dedicated to Neanderthal remains, including the first Neanderthal skull, reconstructed by Marcellin Boule, which I held cautiously in my hands. It felt lightweight and delicate, the sutures starkly visible, perhaps the first compelling piece of evidence that there once were creatures rather like us who became extinct, a disquieting hint that our species likewise might not survive forever. A tray filled with the teeth of many hominids, including the great nutcracker molars of Australopithecus robustus, a contemporary of Homo habilis. A collection of Cro-Magnon skull cases, stacked like cordwood, scrubbed white and in good order. These items were reasonable and in a way expected, the necessary shards of evidence for reconstructing something of the history of our ancestors and collateral relatives.
Deeper in the room were more macabre and more disturbing collections. Two shrunken heads reposing on a cabinet, sneering and grimacing, their leathery lips curled back to reveal rows of sharp, tiny teeth. Jar upon jar of human embryos and fetuses, pale white, bathed in a murky greenish fluid, each jar competently labeled. Most specimens were normal, but occasionally an anomaly could be glimpsed, a disconcerting teratology—Siamese twins joined at the sternum, say, or a fetus with two heads, the four eyes tightly shut.
There was more. An array of large cylindrical bottles containing, to my astonishment, perfectly preserved human heads. A red-mustachioed man, perhaps in his early twenties, originating, so the label said, from Nouvelle Calédonie. Perhaps he was a sailor who had jumped ship in the tropics only to be captured and executed, his head involuntarily drafted in the cause of science. Except he was not being studied; he was only being neglected, among the other severed heads. A sweet-faced and delicate little girl of perhaps four years, her pink coral earrings and necklace still perfectly preserved. Three infant heads, sharing the same bottle, perhaps as an economy measure. Men and women and children of both sexes and many races, decapitated, their heads shipped to France only to moulder—perhaps after some brief initial study—in the Musée de l’Homme. What, I wondered, must the loading of the crates of bottled heads have been like? Did the ship’s officers speculate over coffee about what was down in the hold? Were the sailors heedless because the heads were, by and large, not those of white Europeans like themselves? Did they joke about their cargo to demonstrate some emotional distance from the little twinge of horror they privately permitted themselves to feel? When the collections arrived in Paris, were the scientists brisk and businesslike, giving orders to the draymen on the disposition of severed heads? Were they impatient to unseal the bottles and embrace the contents with calipers? Did the man responsible for this collection, whoever he might be, view it with unalloyed pride and zest?
And then in a still more remote corner of this wing of the museum was revealed a collection of gray, convoluted objects, stored in formalin to retard spoilage—shelf upon shelf of human brains. There must have been someone whose job it was to perform routine craniotomies on the cadavers of notables and extract their brains for the benefit of science. Here was the cerebrum of a European intellectual who had achieved momentary renown before fading into the obscurity of this dusty shelf. Here a brain of a convicted murderer. Doubtless the savants of earlier days