This is part of a graphic from a 1953 issue of Natural History, the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History’s magazine. The article it’s illustrating is about taking a life mask – a casting made of President Lincoln’s face not long before he was assassinated – and comparing it with measurements of people the author refers to as “Southern Mountaineers.” The idea was… well, here’s the first paragraph of the piece:
ALTHOUGH much has been written on the subject, it is still a debated question as to how much the physical guise of a man can tell us about his background and character. Certainly not everything, but sometimes perhaps a great deal. No one, for example, has ever commented on how much Abraham Lincoln embodied in his tall, gaunt figure, with its cadaverous face, the type we have come to recognize as the Southern Mountaineer. But the more we think about it, the more striking the resemblance becomes. Perhaps, in wavs we haven’t appreciated, Lincoln was more a product of the Kentucky hills where he was born and of the people that first settled them than we realize.
To get a baseline for this, uh, “type,” the author used
…Ales Hrdlicka’s measurements of 727 white Americans whose parents and grandparents had all been born in the United States. On the average, these families had probably been in this country for at least 150 years. Most were from the eastern part of the country and represent, so far as we can judge, a constituency similar to the one from which the Southern Mountaineer received his ancestry.