skull-measurer

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English[edit]

Noun[edit]

skull-measurer (plural skull-measurers)

  1. (historical) A phrenologist.
    • 1926, V. Gordon Childe, chapter 1, in The Aryans, page 4:
      Language, albeit an abstraction, is yet a more subtle and pervasive criterion of individuality than the culture-group formed by comparing flints and potsherds or the "races" of the skull-measurer.
    • 2021, Matthew W. Dougherty, chapter 5, in Lost Tribes Found: Israelite Indians and Religious Nationalism in Early America[1], page 136:
      Some classified them as irreducibly distinct from Europeans while others, such as the prolific skull-measurer Samuel George Morton, classified them as nearly "Caucasian," that is, White.