Strangely beautiful, utterly unique, Specimens of Hair presents the
obsessive work of a 19th-century amateur naturalist who collected
hundreds upon hundreds of specimens of hair--animal and human, Including
thirteen of the first fourteen U.S. presidents--in his quest to
understand the mysteries of the natural world.
No matter who we are, old or young, fashion conscious or style
indifferent, we are all aware of hair. We wash it; we comb it; we cut,
curl, and dye it. Hair can be envied or derided, and hair can provide
clues to everything from age to culture to genetic identity to health.
To a nineteenth-century amateur naturalist named Peter A. Browne, hair
was of paramount importance: he believed it was the single physical
attribute that could unravel the mystery of human evolution.
Thirty years before Charles Darwin revolutionized understanding of the
descent of man, Browne vigorously collected for study what he called the
"pile" (from the Latin word for hair, pilus) of as wide a variety of
humans (and animals) as possible in his quest to account for the
differences and similarities between groups of humans. The result of his
diligent, obsessive work is a fastidious, artfully assembled
twelve-volume archive of mammalian diversity.
Browne's growing quest for knowledge became an all-consuming
specimen-collecting passion. By the time of his death in 1860, Browne
had assembled samples from innumerable wild and domestic animals, as
well as the largest known study collection of human hair. He obtained
hair from people from all parts of the globe and all walks of life:
artists, scientists, abolitionist ministers, doctors, writers,
politicians, financiers, military leaders, and even prisoners, sideshow
performers, and lunatics. His crowning achievement was a gathering of
hair from thirteen of the first fourteen presidents of the United
States. The pages of his albums, some spare, some ornately decorated,
many printed ducit amor patriae--led by love of country--are distinctly
idiosyncratic, captivating, and powerfully evocative of a vanished
world.
Browne's albums have been sequestered in the archives of the Academy of
Natural Sciences in Philadelphia to which Brown bequeathed them,
narrowly escaping destruction in the 1970s. They are a unique
manifestation of the avid collecting instinct in nineteenth-century
scientific endeavors to explain the mysteries of the natural world.
