ABSTRACT
Ethnologists sought to introduce the study of human races as a specialised branch of natural history. Prichard and his colleagues in the Ethnological Society of London shared a belief in monogenesis (the origin of all humans in a single creation) and therefore viewed races not as different species but as varieties of the human created through a historical process of differentiation. The natural history of man was thus seen as one of progressive or regressive modification. Some races underwent rapid forms of cultural development that ultimately enabled them to create advanced forms of civilisation corresponding with their continuing anatomical refinement. Others developed more slowly or stood still through successive generations. The ‘lower’ races comprised those who had regressed from the condition of ‘the Adamite family’ – who with their fixed dwelling place and basic practices of cultivation represented the starting point of civilisation – and degenerated towards a nomadic way of life dominated by brutish instincts.1 As scientists, the London ethnologists studied ‘the intellectual, moral and physical modifications which man appears to have undergone’.2 As philanthropists, they saw their role as involving a duty of care towards inferior races, whose regressive slide might at least be halted through Christian education and some training in agriculture.
