Joseph-Marie Degérando, who penned the ethnographic instructions that were adopted for the Baudin expedition's voyage to the South Seas, advised French naturalists and scientific travellers to investigate the “senses of the Savage”. He urged them to ascertain which senses native peoples most frequently called upon and what circumstances influenced their development. These instructions also requested explorers to compare indigenous people's faculties of sense to those of the Europeans, and to determine to “what class and species of sensation do they attach most pleasure?” Degérando even proposed a methodology, which Baudin and his men were rarely if ever in the position to carry out. He suggested that the ethnographer should judge each particular sense against the following criteria:

1. the art with which two or more sensations are distinguished;

2. the tenuity of sensations that can be noticed; 3. the number of sensations that can be simultaneously grasped; 4. the speed with which the operations are carried out; 5. the capacity to prolong them for a more or less long period without fatigue; 6. finally, the precision of the judgements which sometimes accompany them.

Degérando's naive disregard of the practical circumstances in which explorers would commonly find themselves was patent, for they rarely had the opportunity to follow his carefully constructed methods of observation. However, his instructions reveal the broader significance placed on investigating the human senses in the eighteenth century.