Blumenbach, the most profound anthropologist of the last century, and author of the first actual treatise upon the natural history of man, distinguished in his Latin work, De Homine, five races of men, the Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, Malay and American. Another anthropologist, Prochaska, adopted the divisions pointed out by Blumenbach, but united under the name of the white race, Blumenbach’s Caucasian and Mongolian groups, and added the Hindoo race.
The eloquent naturalist Lacépède, in his Histoire naturelle de l’Homme, added to the races admitted by Blumenbach the hyperborean race, comprising the inhabitants of the northern portion of the globe in either continent.
Cuvier fell back upon Buffon’s division, admitting only the white, black and yellow races, from which he simply derived the Malay and American races.
A naturalist of renown, Virey, author of l’Histoire naturelle du Genre humain, l’Histoire naturelle de la Femme, and of many other clever productions upon natural history and particularly anthropology, gave much attention to the classification of the human races. But he was not favourable to the unity of our species, being led to entertain the opinion that the human species was twofold. This was the starting point of an erroneous deviation in the ideas of naturalists who wrote after Virey. We find Bory de Saint Vincent admitting as many as fifteen species of men, and another naturalist, Desmoulins, doubtless influenced by a feeling of emulation, distinguished sixteen human species, which, moreover, were not the same as those admitted by Bory de Saint Vincent.
This course of classification might have been followed to a much greater extent, for the differences among men are so great, that if strict rule is not adhered to, it is impossible to fix any limit to species. Unless therefore the principle of unity has been fully conceded at starting, the investigation may result in the admission of a truly indefinite quantity.
This is the principle which pervades the writings of the most learned of all the anthropologists of our age, Dr. Pritchard, author of a Natural History of Man, which in the original text formed ten volumes, but of which the French language possesses but a very incomplete translation.
Dr. Pritchard holds that all people of the earth belong to the same species; he is a partisan of the unity of the human species, but is not satisfied with any of the classifications already proposed, and which were founded upon organic characteristics. He, in fact, entirely alters the aspect of the ordinary classifications which are to be met with in natural history. He commences by pointing out three families, which, he asserts, were in history the first human occupants of the earth: namely the Aryan, Semitic, and Egyptian. Having described these three families, Pritchard passes to the people who, as he says, radiated in various directions from the regions inhabited by them, and proceeded to occupy the entire globe.
This mode of classification, as we have pointed out, leaves the beaten track trodden by other natural historians. For this reason it has not found favour among modern anthropologists, and this disfavour has reacted upon the work itself, which, notwithstanding, is the most complete and exact of all that we possess upon man. Although it has been adopted by no other author, Pritchard’s classification of the human race appears to us to be the most sound in principle.
M. de Quatrefages, in his course of anthropology at the Museum of Natural History, Paris, makes a classification of the human race based upon the three types, white, yellow and black; but he appends to each of these three groups, under the head of mixed races attached to each stem, a number of races more or less considerable and arbitrary which were excluded from the three chief divisions.