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Made during a Voyage round the World, on Physical Geography, Natural History, and Ethic Philosophy (1778). Johann Reinhold Forster was accepted into the Royal Society in 1771, Georg Forster in 1777, sponsored by Sir James Banks.
     
     

* The most accessible discussion of Blumenbach and his fivefold racial classification lies in Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man , rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), esp. 401–12. However, as Thomas Junker points out, Gould’s visual representation of Blumenbach’s “racial geometry” conveys a misleading impression. See Junker, “Blumenbach’s Racial Geometry,” Isis 89, no. 3 (1998): 498–501.
     
     

* Blumenbach places Caucasians as far east as the river Ob’. One of Russia’s greatest rivers, the Ob’ flows north out of central Asia, passing Novosibirsk, Russia’s third most populous city, and empties into the Kara Sea.
     
     

* Here, as would other so-called authorities in race thinking, Blumenbach falls back on the authority of untutored observers to reinforce his scientific truths.
     
     

* Asch had begun his medical studies in Tübingen and then finished them in Göttingen in 1750, with the famous Albrecht von Haller, before Blumenbach’s time. Asch was born in the same year as Blumenbach’s brother-in-law, the classicist Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729–1812), who was responsible for the Göttingen University library. The Asch-Heyne correspondence, begun in 1771, holds over 120 letters from Asch to Heyne, many accompanying Asch’s generous gifts to the Göttingen University library. In Göttingen, Asch is known as one of the library’s foremost patrons, for in addition to sending Blumenbach numerous skulls, he also enriched the university library’s collection with gifts of Slavic and Persian books.
     
     

* In the twentieth century, the most famous of the people from the Georgia of Russian fame was Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (1879–1953), better known as Joseph Stalin (“Man of Steel”), whose relentless use of power largely overshadowed considerations of his looks.
     
     

* Meiners’s life is not nearly as well documented as Blumenbach’s. The fullest recent sources for information in his regard are found in the work of Dougherty, Zantop, Britta Rupp-Eisenreich, and Carhart, mentioned in this chapter’s endnotes.
     
     

† Organizations like the Royal Societies of London and St. Petersburg and Göttingen’s own Royal Scientific Society brought together “scholars and moneybags” from across the Western world.
     
     

* The popular Berlin writer August Lafontaine (1758–1831) published a four-volume satiric novel making fun of Meiners and his ugly dark and beautiful blond people in 1795–96.
     
     

* De Staël’s mother was famous as the love of the author Edward Gibbon and the host of a noted Parisian salon. The equivalence between £80,000 in 1786 and US$1.5 million today can only be approximate, given the difference in currency and the passage of so much time.
     
     

* Early in the nineteenth century Wilhelm von Humboldt set German education on the classics, thereby furthering German Grecomania. Founded in 1810, the University of Berlin became known as Humboldt University when Germany and Berlin were partitioned between Western and Soviet spheres after the Second World War. In 1948 scholars from Humboldt founded the Free University in West Berlin. Since German reunification in the 1990s the two universities in Berlin have lived in increasingly uneasy coexistence.
     
     

* “Blue blood” is a nineteenth-century expression in English intended to differentiate people of the leisure class—i.e., people who do no work outside and whose veins therefore show through untanned skin—from workers whose outdoor labor darkens their skin sufficiently to mask the veins. It came into English from the Spanish sangre azul , denoting people of noble Visigothic rather than Jewish or Moorish descent.
     
     

* The