Written by C.S., 1974
Institutions of this sort have a public and a private side. The public side includes the exhibits in ethnography, say, or cultural anthropology: the costumes of the Mongols, or bark cloths painted by Native Americans, some perhaps prepared especially for sale to voyageurs and enterprising French anthropologists. But in the innards of the place there are other things: people engaged in the construction of exhibits; vast storerooms of items inappropriate, because of subject matter or space, for general exhibition; and areas for research...
Research materials overflowed into the corridors: a reconstruction of a Paleolithic cave floor, showing where the antelope bones had been thrown after eating. Priapic wooden statuary from Melanesia. Delicately painted eating utensils. Grotesque ceremonial masks. Assagai-like throwing spears from Oceania. A tattered poster of a steatopygous woman from Africa. A dank and gloomy storeroom filled to the rafters with gourd woodwinds, skin drums, reed panpipes and innumerable other reminders of the indomitable human urge to make music.
...Most of the rooms were evidently used for storage of anthropological items, collected from decades to more than a century ago. [There was] the sense of a museum of the second order, in which were stored not so much materials that might be of interest as materials that had once been of interest. You could [still] feel the presence of nineteenth-century museum directors engaged, in their frock coats, in goniométrie and craniologie, busily collecting and measuring everything, in the pious hope that mere quantification would lead to understanding.
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 articulated 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... 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 [own] 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", [so to speak] -- Siamese twins joined at the sternum, say, or a fetus with two heads, [all] four eyes tightly shut.
There was more. An array of large cylindrical bottles containing...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 sweetfaced 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...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 zeal???!
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 [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, [the] brain of a convicted murderer. Doubtless the savants of earlier days had hoped there might be some "anomaly", some telltale sign in the brain anatomy or cranial configuration of murderers. Perhaps they had hoped that murder was a matter of "heredity" and [NOT] society!
Phrenology was [SUCH] a graceless nineteenth-century "aberration"! ...Ann Druyan [was quoted as] saying: "The [very] people we starve and torture have an unsociable tendency to steal and murder. We think it's because their brows overhang." But the brains of murderers and savants -- the remains of Albert Einstein's brain are floating wanly in a bottle in Wichita -- are indistinguishable...
These forgotten jars and their grisly contents had been collected, at least partly, in a humanistic spirit; and perhaps, in some era of future advance in brain studies, they would prove useful once more. [It would be interesting] in knowing a little more about the red-mustachioed man who had been, in part, returned to France from New Caledonia.
But the surroundings, the sense of a chamber of horrors, evoken unbidden other, unsettling thoughts! At the very least, we feel in such a place a pang of sympathy for those -- especially those who died young or in pain -- who are in so unseemly a way thus memoralized. Cannibals in northwestern New Guinea employ stacked skulls for doorposts, and sometimes for lintels. Perhaps these are the most "convenient" building materials available, but the architects cannot be entirely unaware of the terror that their constructions evoke in unsuspecting passers-by! Skulls have been used by Hitler's SS, Hell's Angels, shamans, pirates, and even those who label bottles of iodine, in a concious effort to elicit terror. And it makes perfectly good sense. If [you] find [yourself] in a room filled with skulls, it is likely that there is someone nearby, perhaps a pack of hyenas, perhaps some gaunt and dedicated decapitator, whose "occupation" or "hobby" it is to collect skulls. Such fellows are almost certainly to be avoided, or, if possible, killed! That prickle of the hairs on the back of [your] neck, the increased heartbeat and pulse rate, that strange, clammy feeling are designed by [Nature] to make [you] fight or flee!!! ...Finding yourself in a room full of brains is still more horrifying, as if some unspeakable moral monster, armed with ghastly blades and scooping tools, were shuffling and drooling somewhere in the attics of the Musée de l'Homme.
But it all depends...on the purpose of the collection. If its objective is to find out, if it has acquired human parts post mortem -- especially with the prior consent of those to whom the parts once belonged -- then little harm has been done, and perhaps in the long run some significant human good. But [can we be] SURE the scientists are ENTIRELY free of the motives of those New Guinea cannibals; are they not at least saying: "I live with these heads every day. They don't bother me. Why should you be so 'squeamish'???!!"
Editor's Note: the above material was written by renowned scientist and astronomer, Carl Sagan, as part of his essay entitled "Broca's Brain". That essay appeared as the lead article in his book, "Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science" (Random House, New York, 1979, ISBN 0-394-50169-1). The article appearing here has been heavily edited to emphasize the Lovecraftean "flavor" running through Sagan's essay, with interpolated words shown by brackets []; text deletions noted by the use of three dots "..."; and the addition of italics and punctuation to enhance the mood. In another essay in the same volume -- "Science Fiction -- A Personal View" -- Sagan noted that he first encountered the SF genre at the age of eleven (i.e., sometime in 1945). Considering the underlying mood of his "Brain" essay, could we speculate profitably that he may also have encountered somewhat of the Mythos in his early readings? It is very tempting to think so! To read the complete text of Sagan's essay, "Broca's Brain", please check your local library for a copy. Very highly reccomended! This material is presented here strictly by way of entertainment. No infringement of copyright is either implied nor intended by this editor through this presentation.
This page revised 28 August 2007