It is difficult to imagine the impact that Pieter Camper's intellectual leap had on his fellow anatomists back at the turn of the 19th century with this image1--with a mass of collected data, Camper was able to realistically suggest the facial qualities of a skull. I'm not sure exactly when this effort was first made, but it seems to my memory that this is a very early effort. But the mass of Camper's work generally takes a bad turn turn when it came to representing his findings with theory. 
I wrote about Camper earlier on this blog addressing his "Bad Ideas of 1778", in which it seemed as though he was doing anatomic transformations of animals into humans. Camper (1722-1789) was a determined and excellent observer, which led to him understanding the skull like no other, but who was also lost among the numbers. He was full of angles and degrees, articulating genetic possibilities by the measure of a face and the sentiments of its accumulated measurements. He was also in his mind fully capable of judging a person by the physical measurement of their faces, which led to publications like his 1764 Oration on the Origin and Colour of the Blacks, in which he writes:
"...some attribute peculiar to the quarter of the world; or the specifications of some singular ornament, peculiarity of dress, or of custom…. Thus, an Asiatic is distinguished from an European by colour and dress: the African and American, being somewhat similar in colour and dress, are known by the addition of a crocodile and elephant, a cargo of tobacco, incision of the skin, tatowing [tattooing], plumes of feathers, &c."Which leaves us, well, nowhere.
He collected some great data, but Camper was able to advance little beyond its diagrammatic representation: theory was not his calling.
Notes:
1 The engraving comes from Camper's posthumous Dissertation sur les variétés naturelles qui caractérisent la physiognomie des hommes de divers climats et des différens ages suivi de réflexions sur la Beauté; particulièrement sur celle de la tête; avec une Manière nouvelle de dessiner toute sorte de têtes avec la plus grande exacitude.
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