Bodies in motion

Abstract

In late 1839 a Baltimore merchant carefully and deliberately packed a trunk and box for shipment across the Atlantic. The contents of the box—Henry D. Rogers’s geological survey of Pennsylvania, a magnifying glass, a history of mythology, two volumes of Nicholas Nickleby, an instructional guide for painting flowers using watercolors to name but a few items—marked the recipient as a scholar with far-flung interests. Somewhere in the trunk or box, probably packed tightly between the other reading materials on the new garden cemeteries of Baltimore and Philadelphia and Maris Bryant Pierce’s address regarding the future of the Seneca nation, lay a collection of texts on phrenology. The beneficiary of this bounty found much to appreciate when he pried open the containers in January 1840; the work on watercolors in particular was singled out for praise as his “knowledge of the art was very imperfect.”1 The works on phrenology, however, were not particularly useful or compelling. “The premises on which the science is sustained seems to