Henceforward the polygenists began to gain ground. Theophrastus Paracelsus (1520) first asserted the plurality of the races of mankind, and explained the Mosaic cosmogony as having been written “theologically—for the weaker brethren.” Vanini (1616) mentions a belief, entertained by atheists, that man was descended from or allied to monkeys. In 1655 Isaac de la Peyrère, a Calvinist scholar of Bordeaux, published in Amsterdam his Præ-Adamitæ, to prove that Adam and Eve were not the first human beings upon the earth; and his work, being prohibited by authority, became immensely popular.
His theory, though unorthodox, was founded on Scripture, and regarded Adam and Eve as merely a special and much later creation; the Gentiles, who peopled the rest of the earth, having been formed from the dust of the earth, together with the beasts of the field, on the sixth day. The inhabitants of the New World, which, being separate from the Old, could not have been peopled with the same race, were of Gentile origin. This theory was bitterly opposed. The Parlement of Paris caused the book to be publicly burned. The Inquisition laid hands on the author, and he was forced to abjure both his Pre-Adamite heresy and his Calvinism. He died in a convent in 1676.
The writings of the Encyclopedists, the freedom of thought claimed by Voltaire and Rousseau, together with the classification of species by Linnæus, emboldened the polygenists. Lord Kames[[34]] was one of the earliest exponents in England, and he soon found many followers. Two separate lines of antagonism may be distinguished in the controversy. In one—the Anglo-French—Prichard, Cuvier, and de Quatrefages represent the monogenists, and Virey and Bory de Saint-Vincent the polygenists; the other, in which America and the slavery question were implicated, polygenists and anti-abolitionists going hand-in-hand, was represented by Nott and Gliddon in America, Knox and Hunt in England, and Broca in France.
[34]. Sketches on the History of Man, 1774.
When materials began to accumulate they were detrimental to the polygenist theory. Especially was this the case with regard to the proof of what Broca termed “eugenesis”—i.e., that all the Hominidæ are, and always have been, fertile with each other. This, which formed a test between species and varieties in Botany and Zoology, was claimed also in Anthropology, and the polygenists had to seek for support elsewhere. They found it in Linguistics; “language as a test of race” bulked large in ethnological controversy, and is not yet entirely extinct.
At first the monogenists claimed language as supporting their views. All languages were to be traced to three sources—Indo-European, Semitic, and Malay; and these, in their turn, were the offspring of a parent tongue, now entirely lost. But it was soon found impossible to reconcile even Aryan and Semitic, and a common parent for all three languages was inconceivable. The linguistic argument then passed over to the polygenists.
Hovelacque stated that “the ascertained impossibility of reducing a multiplicity of linguistic families to a common centre is for us sufficient proof of the original plurality of the races that have been developed with them.” M. Chavée[[35]] went further. “We might,” he says, “put Semitic children and Indo-European children apart, who had been taught by deaf mutes, and we should find that the former would naturally speak a Semitic language, the latter an Aryan language.” F. Müller and others took up this line of argument, holding that distinct stock languages proved the existence of distinct stock races. But, as Professor Keane points out, in his summary of the controversy (1896, chap. vii.), quod nimis probat, nihil probat—what proves too much, proves nothing—and the hundred or more stock languages in America alone, reduced the argument to an absurdity.
[35]. See Topinard, 1878, p. 424.
Monogenists.
Among the monogenists may be included most of the older anthropologists—Linnæus, Buffon, Blumenbach, Camper, Prichard, and Lawrence. Since they held that all mankind was descended from a single pair (the question as to whether this pair were white, black, or red, occasioned a further discussion), they had to account for the subsequent divergence producing the present clearly-recognised varieties; and, in so doing, anticipated the theory of evolution, which was not clearly enunciated until the time of Lamarck.