Hair-to-Hair: George Washington, a Grizzly Bear, Andrew Jackson, and a Siberian Mammoth

In the mid 19th-century, Peter A. Browne, of Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences, put together a massive, eclectic collection of preserved hair samples (much of it still held at the Academy today) from historic figures, animals, mummies, insane asylum inmates--you name it. His goal: to develop calculi by which moral character and other qualities of people could be scientifically inferred from their hair samples alone (a riff on the many 19th-century pseudo-scientific theories of "physiognomy"). Lately, I've been having some fun with Browne's data, rendering visually, as one might today in PowerPoint, some of the hairbrained comparisons his research purported to allow. A case-in-point: this tangled hair-to-hair comparison of properties of George Washington's, a grizzly bear's, Andrew Jackson's, and a "Siberian mammoth's" tresses. #themoreyouknow