Descartes' Bones

by Russell Shorto

  Two years passed. Then one day in March 1821, Berzelius opened a Stockholm newspaper and found his attention caught by an article on the estate of the late Professor Anders Sparrman—the man whom Berzelius had first worked under at the School of Surgery, and whose position he had eventually taken. “Something curious has been noted recently,” the article read. “At the auction following the death of professor and medical doctor Sparrman, the skull of the famous Cartesius was sold. It is said to have been purchased for 17 or 18 riksdaler.”

  Berzelius was stunned by the coincidence—that he had been in Paris when it was discovered that the skull of Descartes was missing and that, apparently, it had been in the possession of a man he himself had known. He immediately went to work. He contacted the auction house, and found that the skull had been bought by a casino owner—and evidently a fairly infamous figure—named Arngren. The vogue for maintaining a “cabinet of curiosities”—bones, tusks, fossils, carved artifacts, feathered headdresses, seed pods, fertility charms, butterflies, dried dung: a microcosmic attempt to make order out of the teeming chaos of the natural and anthropological worlds—was then at its height, and Arngren seemed to have thought the skull of the great thinker would make a nice addition to the one on display at his casino. Berzelius went to him, outlined the history of the bones of Descartes, and explained that it had recently been discovered in Paris that the head was missing. To Berzelius’s surprise, Arngren agreed to give the object to Berzelius for what he had paid for it.

  Berzelius then sat down to write the letter quoted at the start of the chapter, which accompanied the remarkable object itself, the skull of Descartes. His closest associate at the academy in Paris was Berthollet, his fellow chemist, but he thought it best to write to the biologist Georges Cuvier, both because Cuvier had also taken a keen interest in Descartes’ bones and because he served alongside Delambre as the second permanent secretary. On receiving the skull, Cuvier decided it would be kept in the Museum of Comparative Anatomy, which was part of the Museum of Natural History. But he wasn’t about to store it away just yet. It merited special attention.

  The skull of Descartes. Across the forehead, in Swedish, is an accusation of a theft in 1666 that began the skull’s peregrinations. Above it is a poem in Latin celebrating Descartes’ genius and mourning the scattering of his remains.

  An eighteenth-century depiction of the court of Queen Christina in Stockholm by Pierre Louis Dumesnil. Descartes is standing to the right; the Queen is seated opposite him.

  A seventeenth-century image showing The Dam, the central square in Amsterdam, shortly after the time Descartes lived there.

  Anatomical drawings by Descartes illustrating mind and body interactions from his book Tractatus de Homine.

  Title page of the first edition of Descartes’ epoch-making work.

  Drawings of Henricus Regius (left), Descartes’ first “disciple,“ and Gysbert Voetius, who led the attack on Descartes in the Netherlands in the 1630s.

  The location of Descartes’ home in the Dutch city of Utrecht, as it was in the 1640s.

  The building in Paris that was the site of Jacques Rohault’s weekly Cartesian salon in the mid-1600s. Today it houses a karaoke bar.

  A meticulous eighteenth-century rendering of coffins and remains found in the old Church of St. Geneviève. It includes no indication of the coffin of Descartes.

  The Church of St. Geneviève in Paris, on the right, was the second resting place of Descartes’ bones, from which Alexandre Lenoir supposedly retrieved the remains during the upheaval of the Revolution. The church no longer exists.

  Alexandre Lenoir, in a print showing him protecting tombs and monuments from the depredations of revolutionaries.

  An eighteenth-century drawing depicting the interior of Alexandre Lenoir’s Museum of French Monuments, which Napoleon said reminded him of Syria.

  The decree of the revolutionary National Convention in Paris, dated October 1793, which gave Descartes, and his remains, special honors.

  The portrait of Descartes now credited to Frans Hals.

  The bust of Descartes created by Paul Richer in 1913, with its breakaway face.

  The classic portrait of Descartes in the Louvre, which was long thought to be by Frans Hals.

  Paul Richer’s analysis of the skull of Descartes hit the New York Times on January 26, 1913.

  The bust of Descartes, based on the skull, created for the 2000 Great Exhibition of the Face in Tokyo.

  AT LEAST AS MUCH as others who would be associated with Descartes’ bones—Rohault, Condorcet, Alexandre Lenoir, Delambre, Berzelius himself—Georges Cuvier personified a major aspect of modernity. Indeed, all three of the men who involved themselves with the bones at this stage made their names in association with what was the principal scientific concern of the day: classification and measurement of the overwhelming amount of data that was coming in from all quarters. Delambre brought into being what would become the global standard of measurement. Berzelius developed the modern method of representing the chemical elements and ascertained how they combine to form virtually every substance on earth. The situation in biology was particularly complex. Biologists craved the sort of base principles that Newton had developed for physics. Trying to classify life-forms begged the question of what overall purpose you had in mind. The system that was still largely in effect in the early nineteenth century was the “teleological taxonomy” created by Aristotle and refined by the Scholastic philosophers: the “scale of beings” system, which the French called the série, or series, and which is popularly known as the “great chain of being.” As with the medieval system of bodily humors, it was far more complex and useful than its popular stereotype suggests, but it had a serious limitation, which was its teleological basis. Teleology refers to an end or ultimate purpose and typically means a religious purpose, as in God’s plan. Aristotle’s orientation of knowledge was teleological, which made it easy for the Scholastics to adapt it to conform with a Christian view of creation, so that as the chain of life-forms proceeded from the simplest organisms to more complex ones it also reflected a spiritual hierarchy. In the eighteenth century this system began to lose its usefulness. By the early nineteenth century biologists and botanists had a frank case of “physics envy”—a yearning for a Newton-like figure to create underlying laws to ground their science. Cuvier argued for a completely new system that ignored teleology and instead grounded itself in observation of bodily parts and their functions. In coming up with his system, he helped invent modern zoology and comparative anatomy.

  Cuvier’s work built on that of his predecessor, the Swede Carl Linnaeus, who had ranked living creatures into kingdom, class, order, genus, and species. Linnaeus had looked to the parts of the reproductive system as a basis for classifying and differentiating creatures, but while reproduction was undeniably elemental, it was not necessarily the most useful organizing principle. Cuvier based his system instead on the correlation of parts and how those parts worked together and in a creature’s environment (an animal with sharp claws also tended to have teeth appropriate for tearing into the prey it captured). He divided animals into four categories based on body structure—vertebrates, mollusks, articulates (for example, insects), and radiates (for example, starfish)—a system that remained basic to biology for most of the modern era. Cuvier applied his system with an almost mathematical logic. A ruminant animal, by definition, had to have a forestomach in which it partially digested its food, so if you found an animal with such an internal arrangement you knew it was a ruminant, and conversely if you found an animal without a forestomach it could not possibly be one that digested its food in two stages. A perhaps apocryphal story has some of Cuvier’s students wrapping one of their number in a cowhide and challenging their teacher to identify the beast. As the master entered the room, the student cried, “Cuvier, I am the devil, I’ve come to eat you!” Whereupon Cuvier is supposed to have replied something to the effect of “Don’t be ridiculous. You have a divided hoof, t
herefore you eat grain.”

  Comparative anatomy was only one of the fields that Cuvier pioneered. His interest in bones led directly to the study of fossils. Comparing skeletons of extinct animals of different geological eras led him to conclude that the earth had endured several prehistoric cataclysms, resulting in mass extinctions. He noted, of course, the slight alterations in skeletons of seemingly related creatures but did not argue in favor of a theory of evolution. It was in the air at the time; his countryman and colleague at the academy Jean-Baptiste Lamarck had recently advanced an evolution argument. But, to the contrary, despite his many groundbreaking accomplishments, Cuvier is best known today for retarding the advance of evolution in the scientific community, keeping it from serious consideration until the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859. Technically, scientifically, Cuvier’s objection was based on his theory of the correlation of parts. Nature, he wrote, “has realized all those combinations which are not repugnant and it is these repugnancies, these incompatibilities, this impossibility of the coexistence of one modification with another which establish between the diverse groups of organisms those separations, those gaps, which mark their necessary limits and which create the natural embranchements, classes, orders, and families.” That is, every species that exists, or that ever did exist, was a functional whole that needed all of its parts to be just the way they were. A slight mutation in one part would collapse the whole system. Evolution based on small changes over generations was thus impossible. Instead, Cuvier argued for the opposite—“fixity of the species”—and did everything in his power as permanent secretary of the Academy of Sciences to advance that view.

  There was a less scientific aspect to Cuvier’s views on evolution. He was a devout Christian, and the early nineteenth century was a time when Christians were using science to undergird the Bible. Such efforts, of course, went back to Descartes himself, who believed that his mechanistic theory of nature was in fact a defense of Christianity—that it “bracketed” the material world, making it the domain of science and leaving theology free to treat the human soul. Belief in science had grown enough by the early nineteenth century that even quite literal-minded Christians tended to look to science for evidence to support, for example, the biblical account of creation or the flood that Noah navigated.

  Cuvier was a rigorous scientist and he didn’t overtly manipulate data to support Christian accounts. However, he was interested in showing that science and faith were compatible, and his approach to biology and paleontology reflected that. The problem was that scientific evidence seeming to contradict basic parts of the Bible had become mountainous. He took account of the same evidence that Darwin would use to argue for changes in species over time based on natural selection but made it serve the opposite theory, one that squared with biblical views of creation. In a way, his argument has a curiously modern sound. He believed in God unquestioningly—in fact regarded it as a misuse of reason to question God—and his belief underlay his science, including his views about the “repugnance” that nature had for changes to its design. For Cuvier, in other words, nature showed the intelligence of the Creator, and the idea of species evolving over time, buffeted by random forces, was repellent both to this larger intelligence and to human intelligence. Beneath his science, then, is a nineteenth-century variant of the very current “intelligent design” theory put forth by Christian thinkers who, like Cuvier, believe that the theory of evolution does harm to the Christian account of the world.

  Cuvier was nevertheless one of the models of a nineteenth-century scientist, and as such he had a love of his field’s development, its increasing complexity, and also its beginnings. When, in May 1821, he received, from the hands of the Swedish ambassador to France, a package sent by Berzelius from Stockholm along with the letter describing his serendipitous discovery, he opened it with something approaching awe. Like Delambre, he had been dismayed by the discovery of the sorry state of the remains during the reburial two years before and by the absence of a skull. Now here was an object that seemed to deepen that mystery and to open another.

  To be sure, the skull was no ordinary object—it wasn’t even an ordinary skull. In the world of art and old paintings, provenance—a paper trail, authenticating proof of a chain of past ownership—is everything. This skull seemingly arrived with its own provenance, which deepened Cuvier’s interest. He contacted Delambre at once, and the two put the subject on the agenda at the academy.

  On April 30, 1821, the Academy of Sciences met at its home on the banks of the Seine. The members included some of the most famous names in the history of science, among them Berthollet, who helped create the language of modern chemistry; Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, he of the evolution theory; Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac, who formulated several laws of physics, codiscovered the actual chemical composition of water, and did the underlying work that led to the “alcohol by volume” calculation that is found on every bottle of wine, beer, and spirits; Pierre-Simon Laplace, who extended the work of Newton in mathematical physics and theorized on the origin of the solar system; and André-Marie Ampère, a discoverer of electromagnetism, for whom one of the basic units of electrical measurement is named. They heard a report on the inflammation of the membranes of the central nervous system. A member named Poyet presented some examples of new methods of bridge construction he had developed. There was a report on the medicinal properties of flowers of the Antilles. Then the assembled luminaries gathered around the object that Cuvier placed before them and studied it with, as the chemist Berthollet said, “a religious reverence.” Cuvier read Berzelius’s letter recounting how he came to be in Paris at the time Descartes was reburied and heard of the absence of a skull among the remains and how, only a month earlier, he discovered that a skull purported to be Descartes’ had come up for auction. “Our minister in Paris, M. le comte de Löwenhjelm, who left here the day before yesterday, was kind enough to take charge of the transport of this relic,” Berzelius’s letter said, “of which I pray you, Monsieur, to make use that you judge reasonable.”

  The skull was missing its lower jaw but was otherwise intact. With its empty black sockets it gazed back at this historic collection of wise men as if chiding them for whatever smugness they may have accumulated in their quest to advance knowledge, forcing them to ponder the hard limit they all faced, the remorseless indifference of death.

  At the same time, it offered a challenge. For these were all men who had devoted their lives to solving nature’s puzzles, for whom method had become second nature, and here was a puzzle about the man who was arguably the father of all their varied disciplines, the very originator of “the method.” The tantalizing thing was that the skull was covered with intricate pen marks. Many were signatures, marks of ownership. But splayed across the top, in fl owing Latin cursive, was a poem that fairly shouted at the observers:

  This small skull once belonged to the great Cartesius,

  The rest of his remains are hidden far away in the land of France;

  But all around the circle of the globe his genius is praised,

  And his spirit still rejoices in the sphere of heaven.*

  The questions piled up. Who had written this, and when? What did “hidden” mean? Was it possible that the bones they had reburied in St.-Germain-des-Prés were not Descartes’? Was this indeed Descartes’ skull, and if so how had it gotten separated from the body? What exactly had happened to the remains of René Descartes in the 171 years since his death?

  A further clue—seemingly a fairly massive one—also offered itself on the skull. This one was right in front, scrawled across the forehead. It was written in Swedish, but Berzelius had provided a translation:

  The skull of Descartes, taken by J. Fr. Planström, the year 1666, at the time when the body was being returned to France.

  Cuvier had done some investigative work and was inclined to support the authenticity of the skull. For corroboration, he placed alongside it an engraved portrait of Descartes and pointed out fo
r the savants what he took to be similarities in cranial features. But more work needed to be done. There were all sorts of oddities; for one, above the sentence about the mysterious Planström were some barely legible words—a name that was hard to make out, “1666” again, and once more the Swedish “tagen,” which Berzelius told them meant “taken.” Cuvier wanted further information about “this precious relic.” The members agreed that someone should continue the research. Then they moved on to other business, perhaps no less of interest, with a Monsieur Virey rising to present his paper on “The Membrane of the Hymen.”

  IT WAS DELAMBRE who took up the matter of investigating the skull. Delambre revered Descartes as a father of science. Delambre also knew that his own major work in the service of science was behind him. He was seventy-two years old and not in good health; the odd little task he was about to undertake could become a coda to his scientific career.

  At the meeting of the academy on May 14, 1821, he presented his findings in a report that ran to three thousand words; his reading of it took up nearly the entire session. He titled it “Skull coming from Sweden said to be that of Descartes: Facts and Reflections,” and indeed it was organized into a series of “Facts” each followed by a section labeled “Remarks.”

  But if his colleague Cuvier was anticipating an exhaustive confirmation of his own speculations, he was to be disappointed. Having completed his investigation, Delambre felt strongly enough about the matter that he deemed it necessary to assume the role of opposing attorney. Across the top of his report he scrawled his conclusion: “M. Cuvier . . . believes that the skull is that of Descartes, because he finds great conformities with the engraving, and I believe the opposite.”