ABSTRACT
Christoph Meiners and his contemporaries took advantage of the travel-related literature that flooded the late eighteenth-century European literary market to describe global variations in everything from body size to hair growth. Just as eighteenth-century aesthetics wrestled with ugliness within the framework of a perfectionist metaphysics, the creators of the study of man wrestled with ugliness within the framework of a conjectural history of progress. After all, ugliness was a judgment about appearance and behavior made by a spectator who identified with the norms of a white, European and Christian society. Using aesthetics to generalize 'national character' the pioneers of anthropology constructed a hierarchy grading the peoples of the world according to an assessment of peoples' general intelligence, ability, and potential. Out of the mix of aesthetics, political polemics, natural history, and the underlying controversies concerning religion, a framework for the establishment of the 'science of man' emerged in Europe in the late eighteenth century.
