His ashes were placed in a cemetery south of San Francisco.

But his brain was not cremated with the rest of him.

It remained in university hands.

Months later, Kroeber offered the brain to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum in Washington, D.C.

In 1917, it was shipped east and accessioned into the museum’s physical anthropology collections.

The contradiction is hard to avoid.

Kroeber had written passionately against the autopsy.

Then, after learning that the brain had already been preserved, he arranged for it to enter another scientific collection.

Historians have debated how to interpret his actions.

Perhaps he believed that once the autopsy had been done, scientific use was preferable to disposal.