Outcasts from evolution : scientific attitudes of racial inferiority, 1859-1900 / John S. Haller, Jr.
- Haller, John S., Jr., 1940-
- Date:
- [1971]
Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Credit: Outcasts from evolution : scientific attitudes of racial inferiority, 1859-1900 / John S. Haller, Jr. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![The Origin of Man Controversy • 73 races.The European had crossed with practically every known race in his conquest of the world. These unions resulted, in certain parts of the globe, and notably in America, [in] an inextricable mass of mixed peoples, wrote Quatrefages, perfectly comparable with our street-dogs and roof-cats.^ Many monogenist arguments for unity of species grew out of the experiments and observations of John Bachman, minister of St. John's Lutheran Church in Charleston, South Carolina.^ Despite their insistence on man's single origin, the monogenists were not egalitarians. Races, during centuries of formation, acquired characteristics that, upon comparison, established an in¬ equality impossible to deny. The Negro had never been equal to the white. Quatrefages wiote, Does it follow that, because all the races of dogs belong to one and the same species, they all have the same aptitudes? Will a hunter choose indifferently a setter, or a bloodhound to use as a pointer or in the chase? Will he consider the street-cur as of equal value with either of these pure-breeds? Certainly not. Now we must never forget that, while superior to animals and different to them in many respects, man is equally subject to all the general laws of animal nature. Though the radical Jeffersonians in American society were inclined to favor monogenism as providing the best scientific or religious certainty for the self-evident truth that all men are created equal, this was hardly more than an inclination on the part of the monogenist himself. Monogenists had drunk deep of the effects of environmentalism and saw no reason to conclude that the Negro was anything but inferior. In fact, rather than to deny inequality, one could argue that the theory of monogenism grew out of an a priori belief in degradation from the original prototype. 8 Armand de Quatrefages, The Natural History of Man (New York, 1875), 78. 9 Ihid., 29. 10 John Bachman, An Investigatíon of the Causes of Hybridity in Animals on Record, Considered in Reference to the Unity of the Human Species, Charleston Medical Journal, V (1850), 168-97; Bachman, The Doctrine of the Unity of the Human Race Examined on the Principles of Science (Charleston, S.C., 1850), 80-81; William Stanton, The Leopard's Spots: Scientific Attitudes toward Race in America, 1815-59 (Chicago, i960), 123-36. 11 Quatrefages, The Human Species, 450-51.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18025729_0094.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
