Donald Grayson (1983:140) pointed out that the hypothesis of polygenesis literally imputes separate origins to different human groups 'regardless of how those groups are treated taxonomically' — that is, without necessarily assigning them to distinct species. The reverse also applies: multiple species need not imply plural origins. Accordingly, Claude Blanckaert (1988:31) observed that 'polygenists implicitly identified race with species' and that, although the original unity of races 'remained always controversial', races were differentiated 'by the same triad of attributes that distinguishes "species": the resemblance, the descent, and the permanence of observable characteristics'. In the 1780s, Georg Forster seriously hypothesized the existence of more than one species of men, using species in the 'invariable' Linnaean sense, but as an anticlerical revolutionary he disparaged the question of origins as 'inexplicable'. Race, however, was a minor term in Forster's empirical vocabulary, positioned in 'tacit subordination' to species as an 'undetermined' synonym for variety. He vigorously rejected Kant's redefinition of races as environmentally determined but permanent and hereditary, on the grounds that indelibility was a character of species, not races.^[57] Yet it was Kant's conceptual innovation that enabled the subsequent approximation of race and species. In the mid-nineteenth century, the polygenist entomologist Emile Blanchard (1819-1900) also took issue with 'races' as a much used but 'ambiguous, even undetermined' word in science, adopted to 'avoid commitment on the importance attached to the differences observed' in the human genus. Yet he himself interchanged the terms race and espèce and insisted that 'the characters of the races perpetuate themselves from century to century without perceptible modification'.^[58]

From 1800, some naturalists in France began to assert the plurality of human species. Buffon's disciple, the politically progressive military physician Julien-Joseph Virey (1775-1846), who had read White and whose own copious writings evidently reached a wide audience, divided the 'human genus' broadly into 'beautiful white' races and 'ugly brown and black' ones (1800, I:145). Sloan (1995:140-1, 151) argued that Virey's work synthesized central strands in eighteenth-century human science by combining Linnaean taxonomy and Buffonian historical geography in a 'fully naturalistic scenario' of man's ascent from the 'state of pure nature' to 'perfect civilization'. Virey nonetheless took serious issue with 'the immortal Buffon' in at least two ways: he represented races as 'primordial', 'permanent', 'hereditary', and resistant to the power of climate; and he hypothesized that 'the negro' — 'less human than the European' and 'close to simple animality' — could be considered a 'distinct species'.^[59] In a much later elaboration of his thesis, Virey (1824, II:30) restricted 'permanence' in the face of external influences to specific characteristics and reconfigured races as merely 'variable modifications of a single, primordial species'.^[60] The 'indelible perseverance of the physical and moral character of the negro' thereby justified Virey's division of the human genus into 'two distinct species', each comprising 'several principal races or stocks'. The species were unnamed but clearly ranked on the basis of markedly divergent facial angles and highly essentialized sets of opposed physical and moral traits, starting with skin colour. The four races of his '1st species' and the two of his '2nd' were labelled by colour and also ranked: he vaunted the 'white European race' as 'superior to all the others in physical and moral qualities' and positioned it 'at the head of the human genus', as 'no longer a simple animal'; he maligned the 'blackish' 'Papuans' of New Guinea, 'Australasia', and New Caledonia as being of characteristically 'diminished occipital capacity', 'the ugliest of men and the closest to the orang-outangs', while conceding that the latter 'belong to another genus'.^[61] Reserving detailed calumny for 'the negro', whom he represented as naturally 'inferior and subjugated', with 'manifest' structural links to orangutans, Virey nonetheless condemned the slave trade and piously allowed that 'this race of men' might advance, with European help, 'to an honourable rank in the scale of perfectibility'.^[62]

In the mid-1820s, at the further end of categorical amplification, the soldier-biologist Jean-Baptiste-Geneviève-Marcellin Bory de Saint-Vincent (1778-1846) and the physician, comparative anatomist, and physiologist Louis-Antoine Desmoulins (1796-1828) identified fifteen and sixteen separate human species respectively. In important other respects, though, their analyses are quite divergent. Bory de Saint-Vincent challenged Cuvier's contention that the human genus 'is unique in its order' by insisting that the genus Orang, composed of beings 'just like us', belonged 'naturally' to the same order as the genus Homo.^[63] He then sharply divided the human genus, making physical structure and 'internal organization' his key determinants of the intellectual and moral limits of different 'species of Men' and combining them with skin colour as core criteria of specific differences. Predictably, his taxonomy was crowned by the 'more beautiful', 'Japhetic species', 'to which we belong'. The 'Negroes of Oceanica' or 'Melanians' comprised his 'next to last species' while the 'Hottentot species' — furthest from the Japhetic in 'appearance and anatomical characteristics', 'closest to the Orangs in the inferiority of its intellectual faculties' — purportedly marked 'the passage from the genus Man to the genera Orang and Gibbon, thus to the Apes'.^[64] Yet, notwithstanding such clear intimations of ranking, both human and simian, Bory (1827a, II:128-9) denied hierarchical intent — he assigned 'no definitive position' for who 'would dare to raise one species above the others' or declare any 'incapable of emerging from the brutish state?' The disingenuousness of this seeming egalitarianism is evident in the flanking sentences which show the mutual complicity of class, national, and racial prejudices in his rhetoric: the Japhetic species owed its 'first rank' to the 'intellectual superiority of a few favoured men' while nine-tenths of the species were hardly more rational than the 'Hottentots' (Khoikhoi); 'beyond the Pyrenees', 'proud' Europeans had fallen 'to the level of New Caledonian savages' whereas Africans transplanted to Haiti had raised themselves 'to the sublime level of the Anglo-American'.

Desmoulins set out to refute both the Buffonian hypothesis that climate determined human 'physical characters' and its monogenist premise that present human occupation of the globe was a product of 'emigrations' by descendants of a single common ancestral stock. He argued instead for 'the invariability of forms', the 'original diversity of species', and the 'plurality of centres of creation'. His determining principle for the concept of species was the 'permanence of the type in the face of contrary influences' but in practice he treated species and race as synonymous. Species could change or new ones emerge only as a product of generation through racial mixing. Species and races were reified entities with constant physiological characters that determined intellect, morality, and behaviour.^[65] However, unlike Bory, Desmoulins insisted on the 'infinite' anatomical distance separating 'the most perfect of the apes from the most imperfect of men'. Moreover, his racial adjudications were relatively benign apart from a residual distaste for Negroes and some native Americans and a tacit presumption of European superiority. He was remarkably positive, if patronizing, about the usually maligned 'Austro-Africans'. The 'Boschisman' (Bushmen or San) and 'Hottentot' races differed markedly from each other and from 'the Negroes'. The Hottentots were 'gentle, quiet, honest', but indolent, and 'much superior' to most Ethiopians in the level of civilization reached. Any identification of the Boschismans with the apes was 'absurd and false' on anatomical, moral, and intellectual grounds: they were 'lively', 'spiritual', energetic, 'ingenious', and, 'after the Caffres, the most moral and intelligent of the peoples of southern Africa'.^[66] Desmoulins's work concludes with a catalogue of 'the species and the races of the human genus': this schematic series of essentialized physical descriptions is relatively dispassionate apart from the recurring negative stereotype of Negro features; moral and intellectual faculties are scarcely mentioned; and racial hierarchy is only implicit in the geographical ordering of species. The inhabitants of Oceania are classified as Species 11-14 under then standard labels: 'Malay or Oceanic'; 'Papuan'; 'Oceanian Negro'; and 'Australasian'.

After about 1800, most naturalists and anthropologists, whatever their theoretical and moral persuasions, subordinated historical conjecture about human origins to the physical description and classification of races or species and abandoned questions of racial genealogy to the avowedly historical disciplines of comparative philology and ethnology.^[67] Desmoulins (1826:336‑57), exceptionally, did address etymological and historical implications of his zoology. The Italian geographer Adriano Balbi (1782-1848) maintained that the systematic comparison and classification of languages — which he called ethnographie — was the only means to reveal the 'primitive origin' of the 'nations' now inhabiting the world but he accepted Desmoulins's innovatory insistence that a shared language in the present need not mean a common racial derivation. Formally committed to the conventional assumption that 'all men' stemmed from a 'single stock, subdivided only into varieties', Balbi nonetheless refused to 'adopt or reject' Desmoulins's 'system' of multiple human species. With respect to the 'Maritime World' of Oceania, Balbi's strongly racialized linguistic geography, gleaned largely from travellers' reports, differentiated a far-flung Malay 'family' of languages from a 'second branch' of unrelated non-Malay tongues designated 'Languages of the Oceanian Negroes'. Their speakers included 'the Australians' whom he disparaged as 'the most brutish savages of the globe' and as 'beings who seem to differ from the orang-outang only by the use of speech'.^[68]

Ethnologie denoted a broad field of inquiry established in France in the 1830s by the physician William-Frédéric Edwards (1777-1842) whose blending of physiology, linguistics, and history, Blanckaert noted (1988:22), combined 'the physical idea of race and the cultural principle of "nationality"'. Edwards (1841) gave renewed impetus to the natural history of man but also confirmed the fixity of races as morphological types. Yet, despite Edwards's own polygenist leanings and the considerable influence of his raciology, the focus of ethnologie on the 'historic races' of Europe and on the interdependence of the moral and physical characteristics of races made it peripheral to the narrowly physicalist polygenism which controlled anthropologie in France during much of the second half of the nineteenth century.^[69]

In Britain, the term ethnology was borrowed in the early 1840s as a retrospective label for the venerable Prichardian approach which continued to dominate the natural history of man for a decade after his death in 1848, in the face of serious challenges to its premises and methods. Strongly philanthropic in origin and institutional connections, ethnology was politically less heterogeneous and religiously more orthodox than ethnologie. Its fundamentally historical goal was to trace the differentiation of all the existing 'races of men' from a 'single stock', in particular through comparative philology.^[70] In contrast, 'Anthropological' enemies of ethnology such as Hunt professed agnosticism on the 'profitless' question of 'Man's origin' but insisted on the specific or even generic division of humanity on physical, intellectual, and moral grounds, including the 'far more numerous' analogies 'between the Negro and apes than between the European and apes'.^[71] The elision of origins — 'an Anglicized Hebrew myth' — and the conflation of race with species were patent in the definitions given by the polygenist Egyptologist George Gliddon (1809-1857) in 1857 to his neologisms 'monogenist' and 'polygenist': 'the doctrines of schools professing to sustain dogmatically the unity or the diversity of human races' (1857:402, 428-31).