Before the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859), the concept of species was given diverse, often ambiguous meanings depending on a shifting constellation of relative emphases: on reproductive or morphological criteria; history or taxonomy; environment or heredity; hybridization or racial purity; and transmutation or fixity. From Linnaeus to Darwin, definitions of species oscillated unsteadily between versions of fixism and transformism, often pivoted on the vexed question of racial crossing and its status in the unity or otherwise of the human species. Linnaeus initially professed what James Larson called a 'naive religious faith' that species were fixed, discrete products of the original creation of a 'single pair of all living beings'. Though this early conviction consistently informed Linnaeus's abstract taxonomic practice, from about 1760 the oft-reiterated dictum nullae species novae, 'no new species', vanished from his writings as he became convinced empirically that new plant species could emerge through cross-breeding — indeed, his contemporaries often branded him a transformist.^[88]

Although Buffon paid lip service to the dominant contemporary dogma that species were original and eternal, he represented them in practice in secular historical terms as real, dynamic physical entities comprising 'similar individuals who reproduce themselves'. His mature formulation that animals might be reduced to 'a quite small number of families or principal stocks, from which it is not impossible that all the others have issued' through degeneration, acknowledged the problematic of transformation in altered environments. As with Kant (who, however, always insisted on the original permanance of races and species and rejected developmentalism), Buffon's breeding criterion for species membership — the capacity for 'constant reproduction' — qualified the strong morphological emphasis common to most taxonomists, foregrounded the question of hybrids, and served to validate his principled belief that all human beings belonged to 'a single same species' since, despite dramatic differences in appearance, they could all interbreed and produce fertile offspring.^[89] While Blumenbach did not doubt human interfertility, he saw the 'principle sought from copulation' as 'uncertain' and 'not sufficient' to define the concept of a species or differentiate it from a variety. He resorted instead to the morphological criteria of 'analogy and resemblance'. Blumenbach dismissed coupling between different species as rare and usually sterile but attributed some transformative potential to 'hybrid generation' between different varieties of the same species which produced offspring identical to neither parent but 'midway' in form between them.^[90] Yet in his ultimate view, the Umschaffung, 'remodelling', of species over time signified only 'the great mutability in nature' which he attributed in turn 'to the benevolent, wise dispensation of the Creator'. Lenoir pointed out that Blumenbach was not an evolutionist because he did not posit 'a transformation of species by means of the acquisition of new characters', an impossibility in Kantian theoretical terms.^[91]

Cuvier's immense institutional prestige in France no doubt enhanced the authority of his core premise of the integrity and fixity of species: a species comprised 'all the beings' with a common 'fixed' form, perpetuated 'by generation' and 'confined within quite narrow limits' that had remained intact and unchanged 'since the origin of things'. Nature, moreover, sought to prevent the alteration of species through mixing by ensuring their 'mutual aversion'.^[92] He successfully discredited the transformist theories promulgated by his Muséum colleagues, the zoologists Jean-Baptiste de Monet de Lamarck (1744-1829) and Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772-1844), the father of Isidore, who proposed materialist narratives about the transmutation over time of 'lower' into 'higher' organisms.^[93] In Martin Rudwick's judgment (1997:179, note 4), Cuvier's refutation of Lamarck determined the direction of research on the question of species 'right up to the time of Darwin'.

In Britain, Lawrence endorsed Cuvier's twin dictums that species were 'constant and permanent'; and that uniformity was maintained 'by generation' and instinctive 'aversion to union with other species'. But unlike Cuvier, he sought to explain the formation of new races within the single human species, though he too was no evolutionist. He concluded that human diversity was not original but the 'result of subsequent variation' produced by the inheritance of 'native or congenital variety', rather than by the effect of 'external agencies' such as climate, nutrition, or mode of life. Such 'native variety' occurred spontaneously in individuals; or might in principle, on the model of plant and animal breeding, result from 'hybrid generation' between different varieties of the human species.^[94] In his derivative way (the book was a published collection of lectures), Lawrence evidently owed the hypothesis of heritable variations to Prichard who had argued that 'connate variety' always tended 'to become hereditary and permanent in the race', though neither man could explain how the process worked.^[95] In the first edition of Researches (1813), Prichard denied the capacity of 'external powers' to produce permanent human varieties. In the second (1826), he restated the dictum that all 'connate peculiarities of body' were hereditary but brought milieu back into his equation by outlining a 'law of adaptation' to 'particular local circumstances' to account for localized specific diversities within a genus and varieties within a species, including humanity.^[96] Kentwood D. Wells (1971:346-8, 356) saw this tacit recognition of 'conservative aspects of natural selection' as an anticipation of Darwinian evolution though Prichard, like Lawrence, was not an evolutionist since he believed in the fixity of species and was oblivious to the 'creative role' of natural selection in the formation of new ones.

Buffon's breeding criterion had been unproblematically rehearsed by Cuvier: as a young man, he maintained that sexual union was 'the only certain and even infallible character' distinguishing a species; and as a mature savant he allowed that 'the human species appears unique, since all individuals can intermix without distinction, and produce fertile offspring'.^[97] But, like Blumenbach, neither Prichard nor Lawrence thought the breeding criterion a sufficient rationale for human unity because of reported 'exceptions' to the 'supposed law' that cross-species hybrids were sterile. Prichard modified the classic norm by promoting the theoretical premise of 'instinctive repugnance' to the intermixture of species in the wild, with the twin corollary that 'there are no hybrid races' (said of plants) and that animals which propagate together 'frequently and habitually' in their natural state are of the same species. By analogical reasoning, since there was no 'invincible' repugnance between men and women of different races and since human 'mixed breeds' were invariably prolific and capable of engendering 'an entirely new and intermediate stock', they were 'not hybrid' and 'the several tribes of men are but varieties of the same species'.^[98] Lawrence (1819:265-71) invoked Blumenbach's morphological criterion of 'analogy and probability' to draw the same conclusion on similar grounds.

If Buffon's principle of 'continuous fecundity' within the human species was an article of faith for monogenists (Flourens 1850:167-9), a related postulate in their creed, also attributed to Buffon, gave greater scope for racialist cynicism. In 1849, Buffon speculated that some 'Tartars' were 'less ugly & whiter' than others because of intermixture with neighbouring 'European nations'; he later formalized the proposition that it would take only a couple of hundred years to 'wash the skin of a Negro' through 'mixing with the blood of the White' whereas climate alone would take many centuries to produce the same effect.^[99] Early nineteenth-century monogenists reworked Buffon's idea as the principle that 'racial mixing' was ameliorative, at least for the allegedly inferior of the races involved. Prichard, unusually evenhanded, cited anecdotal instances of 'mixed breeds' who were physically superior to either European or indigenous components and made it a dictum, in response to the rising racial hysteria of the late 1840s, that the 'mixture of races' was often 'much more advantageous than their separation'. But Lawrence, relentlessly racialist, declared that 'contamination' by an admixture of 'black or red blood' would cause the 'intellectual and moral character' of Europeans to 'deteriorate', whereas 'an infusion of white blood' would 'improve and ennoble the qualities of the dark varieties'.^[100] Improvement or degeneration thus became two sides of a single racialist coin.

Somewhat paradoxically, the early polygenists tended to be less doctrinaire than Cuvier, Lawrence, and Prichard about the fixity of species and more relaxed about racial crossing which provided their proof for the plurality of human species and their motor for specific change. In works published over more than two decades, Virey spanned a wide gamut of opinion, from empirical to essentialist, though his ambivalent words betray a hankering for the certainty of fixed species and racial purity. On the one hand, he did not doubt the fecundity of human hybrids but subverted Buffon's breeding criterion into an argument against human 'specific unity' on the pragmatic analogy that distinct but adjacent species of animals and plants commonly produced fertile offspring from 'adulterous mixings'. If such crossings could engender 'bastard, intermediary lineages able to propagate themselves continuously' (denied by monogenists), the 'formation of new species' was not theoretically impossible. On the other hand, since nature abhorred specific mixing and inspired universal 'repugnance' against it, species were 'essentially unalterable' in type.^[101] Virey's ambivalence is patent in his discussion of 'mulattos'. He denigrated them as an 'ambiguous', perhaps unstable 'caste', a 'multitude of bastards' produced 'in the colonies' from the abuse of grossly unequal power relations between white men and female slaves. Yet he applauded their physical strength, agility, and vigour as proof of Buffon's supposed claim (endorsed by monogenists) that 'racial crossing improves individuals'.^[102] Bory de Saint-Vincent (1827a, II:134-6) took for granted that human species, races, and varieties were 'naturally and constantly reproduced through innumerable mixtures' and that, as with domesticated animals, their 'characteristic limits' had 'partly disappeared'. Desmoulins (1826:158, 194-7) explicitly qualified his argument that it was 'the permanence of the type, in the face of contrary influences, which constitutes the species' with the proviso that altered or new species could emerge through 'generation', as products of 'the mixing, the fusion of heterogeneous peoples'.

Blanckaert (2003b:46-8) identified the 'status of racial crossbreedings' as the key site for conflict between monogenists and polygenists from about 1830 to 1860. A striking feature of such debates is the tendency for protagonists across the board to camouflage their a priori, value-ridden points of view as scientific and objective while recycling a limited stock of tenuous, circumstantial 'facts' as evidence for radically opposed positions (Stocking 1968:49). Another feature is the steady increment in racialization crosscutting the monogeny/polygeny fault line. Serres's report on Dumoutier's collections is a case in point. It splices nominal monogenism to a theory of physical, intellectual, and moral 'improvement' through racial crossing and gradual 'fusion', trumpeted as the creator's 'natural means' to restore human unity. Though egalitarian in theory, the process envisaged was profoundly 'unequal' in operation since the characters of the 'superior' race were said to 'predominate' in the offspring over those of the 'inferior'.^[103] An identical vision for a monochromatic future, but without the egalitarian veneer and with overt advocacy of racial obliteration, was outlined by the polygenist surgeon-naturalist Jacques-Bernard Hombron (1798-1852), Dumoutier's colleague on Dumont d'Urville's final voyage of 1837‑40 (1846:104-5): 'men will one day comprise only a single race; civilization will extend everywhere, and the inferior races and species will exist only in the archives of history'.

During these three decades, most polygenists took fundamentalist positions against the viability of human hybrids and in favour of morphological criteria for the constancy of species. The presumption of multiple human types enabled them to pervert the monogenists' analogical reasoning by appropriating the axioms of interspecific repugnance and continuous intraspecific fecundity to their own agenda. Notable amongst them were three men with close links to Dumont d'Urville's final voyage: the ships' surgeon-naturalists Hombron and Honoré Jacquinot (1814-1887) who invoked their wide global experience to authorize the individual volumes on 'man' and on 'anthropology' and 'human races' that they contributed to the co-authored Zoologie section of the official voyage publication; and Blanchard, a naturalist at the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, who wrote the Anthropologie volume based on Dumoutier's collections.^[104] Hombron insisted that all species, including the 'several species of men', had been created for particular locales and were 'unchangeable'; that only parents of proximate species could produce fertile offspring; and that the lower a species was in the 'human series', the less its hybrid 'fruits' would share the physical and moral qualities of the 'more beautiful' parent. On these grounds, he damned the progeny of Chinese-Malay and Malay-Papuan unions as 'very disagreeable', 'very ugly', 'monstrous', and probably of limited fertility.^[105] Jacquinot maintained the 'persistence and conservation' of the three 'unalterable' primitive types into which he divided the human genus and took a particularly hard line on human mixing. He denied the prospect of specific change through interbreeding and condemned interspecies sexual relations as a 'perversion of the generative impulse' which occurred in man only through the 'shameful exploitation' of female slaves. The products of such unions were 'abnormal, monstrous', and 'very limited' in fertility. They were almost unknown in New Holland. Jacquinot claimed to be 'the first' to signal the 'sterility' of interspecific human crossbreeds but admitted his lack of 'rigorous' statistical evidence: rather, it was a 'well-known fact' in the colonies and the 'impression' gained from his own 'general observation'.^[106]

Nearly a decade later, Blanchard synthesized and modified the positions taken by Hombron and Jacquinot. He asserted with Hombron that many 'different species of men', comprising a 'natural genus', were created in the countries they still occupied and retained their characters indefinitely 'without perceptible alteration'. He agreed with Jacquinot that racial 'mixtures' were numerically insignificant 'relative to the mass' and rehearsed the theme of natural 'repugnance' against inter-specific coupling. Contra Prichard, the claim of repugnance became his proof that all human beings could not have issued from the same stock and that 'the racial instinct is innate in man's heart'. Blanchard, too, admitted the 'little true knowledge' so far available and leaned heavily on colonial rumour. He moderated Jacquinot's scepticism about durable human crossings: on the one hand, the hybrid products of 'the most different races in the human genus', such as 'whites and negroes', could not be perpetuated indefinitely 'without new mixings'; on the other, 'neighbouring peoples' of very similar races had undiminished interfecundity.^[107] The attribution of differential fertility to human hybrids on racial grounds would be a cornerstone of subsequent debates and often became a critical issue in Europe's colonies.^[108]

Before 1850, polygeny was primarily a continental and American doctrine with few acknowledged advocates in Britain. Even Knox, whose extreme racial and physical determinism and hard line on human hybrids were the equal of any French polygenist, did not profess literal polygenesis since he insisted on the 'evident' unity of man within 'one family, one origin'. However, this 'unity of the organization' was 'embryonic' or 'generic', 'not specific', and the 'one great natural family' of mankind comprised 'many distinct species'.^[109] An institutional outsider, pessimistic and nihilistic, he preached an incongruous amalgam of uncompromising racialism with anticolonial political radicalism and nonprogressive developmentalism, synthesized by an idiosyncratic transcendental biology imbibed from Germany and France via the elder Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.^[110] Knox discerned 'remarkable' organic, mental, and moral differences between the 'races of men' while race was an 'all-pervading, unalterable, physical character', the prime determinant of human history and human character, 'individual, social, national'. Historically, at least, human races were 'permanent' and not interconvertible. Since 'species never mingle' due to 'innate dislike', human hybrids were 'a monstrosity of nature' which could not 'hold their ground' over more than two or three generations and hybrid races were non-existent, even in the case of 'closely affiliated' parents.^[111]

Flatly rejecting the possibility of the slow, unilinear 'transmutation of species' or of 'successive perfectability', Knox argued that the only transmutation known to Nature was 'generic, and not specific' and was as likely to be 'retrogressive' as 'progressive': 'the development, in time and place, of natural families and species already provided for in the structure of the embryo'. Thus, every human embryo embodied 'the type of all the races of men', past, present, and future.^[112] This anti-transmutationist biology underwrote Knox's denial of 'all theories of human progress in time' and fuelled his profound racial and historical pessimism. He pronounced it likely that the 'dark races', (who included 'the Jewish, Coptic, and Gipsy races'), were 'doomed to destruction and extermination' by the 'inextinguishable hatred of races', the 'savage energy' of the 'fair races', and their own physical and psychological 'inferiority', since they could or would not 'progress' and were uncivilizable.^[113] Yet, paradoxically, he also declared any successful colonization to be impossible due to the 'great physiological law' of 'continental influences' — the indirect but powerful influence of milieu, exemplified in the expulsion of the French from Haiti. By this law, which Knox claimed to have discovered, every race was naturally adapted only to its continent of origin: the white man was unable to 'colonize a tropical country' and no race could permanently seize 'any other continent than the one to which they are indigenous'. Thus, not only were races unalterable by 'metamorphosis' or 'intermarriage', but they could not be 'extinguished' by conquest, providing they still occupied 'the soil on which nature first placed them'.^[114]

Though Knox was institutionally marginal in the science of man in Britain during his own lifetime, the extreme racialist views expounded during his provincial lecture tours evidently struck popular chords.^[115] Moreover, as Evelleen Richards (1989:406‑35) has shown, Knox's 'moral anatomy' was far from marginal to the hardening science of race in the 1860s and 1870s or to the well-known struggle for ideological control of anthropology between the Ethnological and Anthropological Societies of London. Not only was Knox acknowledged as the main theoretical inspiration of Hunt and his (mostly) scientifically disreputable, ultra-conservative Anthropological followers, but racial opinions congruent to Knox's were common intellectual currency, including amongst the (mostly) scientifically respectable, politically liberal or radical Darwinians.^[116] Indeed, the application of natural selection to human groups — the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, Darwin's subtitle (1859) — is inherently racialist, notwithstanding any associated philanthropic values.

Thus, the biologist and comparative anatomist Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895), who campaigned strongly for emancipation on moral grounds, maintained in 1865 in a popular polemical essay that, even when freed, 'our prognathous relative' lacked the natural intellect 'to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival' or to attain 'the highest places in the hierarchy of civilisation' (1893:66). Wallace (1864:clxiv-clxv), the co-inventor of the concept of natural selection and an egalitarian utopian socialist,^[117] contended in an address to the Anthropological Society that Europeans were intellectually, morally, and physically 'superior' to the 'low and mentally undeveloped populations' they had encountered in the Americas and the antipodes, whose 'inevitable extinction' he confidently predicted through the operation of Darwin's 'great law'. He partly recanted a few years later on the still highly ethnocentric grounds that natural selection could not explain certain key human physical and intellectual characteristics: even the 'lowest savages' might follow the European trajectory of 'gradual development' since their brains were 'so little inferior in size and complexity to that of the highest types (such as the average European)'.^[118] Darwin himself was a passionate opponent of slavery who normally eschewed overtly racialist language and acknowledged his first-hand experience of the 'mental similarity' of the 'most distinct races of men'. But he did not doubt the reality of a human racial hierarchy or the certainty of displacement of 'the lower races'.^[119] One notorious passage in The Descent of Man (1871:200-1) grafts the ancient idea of the 'organic chain' to the 'principle of evolution' to produce a chilling prognosis: the 'savage races' were positioned nearer to the 'anthropomorphous apes' than were the 'civilised races of man' who would before long 'exterminate and replace' both savages and anthropoids. By positing differential human racial affinity with apes — a position taken by most polygenists — Darwin violated the traditional monogenist concern to quarantine all humanity from categorical intimacy with animals.

Yet Hunt's (1866:327, 339) primary charge against the Darwinians was that they had reinstated the 'unity hypothesis' as a 'new form of monogenism'. Indeed, Wallace candidly explained to the Anthropological Society the Darwinian logic that 'if you do but go far back enough, you must come to a unity of origin', so that man must once have been 'a homogeneous race'. Huxley was more equivocal but reasoned pragmatically that even if the differences between human beings were 'specific', they were so small that it was 'altogether superfluous' to presume 'more than one primitive stock for all'. Darwin made much the same point.^[120] At once historical and rigorously naturalist, environmentalist and hereditarian, his 'principles of evolution' rehabilitated human origins as a legitimate subject for secular, scientific inquiry, shorn of any lingering implications of scriptural authority, but left the question of the present singularity or plurality of the human species largely a matter of definition.^[121] As early as 1845, in a private letter endorsing Prichard's and Lawrence's hypothesis of human variation through the propagation of spontaneous individual 'peculiarities', Wallace had remarked that a 'permanent peculiarity' owing nothing to 'external causes' was zoologically a 'distinction of species & not of mere variety': thus, 'the "Negro" the red Indian & the European' should be considered 'distinct species of the genus Homo'.^[122] Both he and Huxley argued diplomatically that the theory of speciation through natural selection could 'harmonise', 'reconcile', and 'combine' the conflicting positions of the 'Monogenistic and Polygenistic schools'. Darwin, for his part, merely anticipated the 'silent and unobserved death' of the dispute with general acceptance of his theory and expressed 'indifference' about terminology: man might be equally be classed into races, species, or sub-species though he preferred the latter.^[123] Huxley (1894:209) compromised with the term 'persistent modifications'.

Stocking read this contemporary British sensibility to the synthesizing potential of Darwinian theory as an 'institutional dialectic', largely brokered by Huxley and culminating in the emergence of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1871 out of the bitter Ethnological/Anthropological conflict.^[124] Stocking (1973:lxx) tartly remarked on the aptness of evolutionism as an intellectual circuit-breaker in this contest because it was 'at once monogenist and racist'. Blanckaert (1988:48) saw no such synthesis occurring in France where Broca's rigidly physicalist, harshly racialist, polygenist anthropologie held sway. The principal human 'types', Broca argued, must have been created separately because the 'anatomical characters' that differentiated them were 'hereditary and unalterable' and such 'profound' differences were totally at odds with the hypothesis of common origin. Throughout the 1860s, he retained the opinion that species were fixed but allowed for some modification through the 'durable' intermixture of 'neighbouring, but distinct' species.^[125]

In a polemical synthesis on the 'thorny' question of human hybridity, Broca (1858-9, 1859‑60) launched a concerted attack on earlier work across the discursive spectrum. He denounced polygenist racial purists such as Knox, the aristocratic French social thinker Arthur de Gobineau (1816‑1882), and the American physician Josiah Clark Nott (1804‑1873) for their pessimistic 'opinion' that racial crossing was inevitably degenerative and that no 'crossed race' could procreate independently. And he equally condemned the conclusion of monogenists like Prichard that there were no hybrid races because all human beings were uniformly prolific.^[126] Broca instead built on the hypothesis outlined by the American polygenist physician-anatomist Samuel George Morton (1799-1851) that differential 'disparity or affinity' between species resulted in 'degrees of hybridity': thus, the interbreeding of 'remote species of the same genus' produced no hybrids; 'allied species' produced infertile offspring; and 'proximate species' produced fertile progeny. Applying Morton's model to mankind, Nott then sharply differentiated the 'prolific' crossings of proximate human species such as Saxons and Celts from the supposed sterility or limited fertility of the offspring of unions between the 'most widely separated' species, such as Europeans and Negroes, Hottentots, or Australians.^[127]

Broca used an exhaustive survey of hybridity in animals to invert the conceptual core of the monogenists' 'unitary' system — the premise that continuous fecundity at once defined the limits of a species and supplied proof of common origin. By showing that certain interspecific animal crossings could produce 'perfectly and indefinitely fertile' hybrids, he claimed backing by analogy for the polygenist doctrine of plural human species.^[128] The second, more problematic part of his agenda was to demonstrate that not all human couplings were equally fertile, enabling him at once to defend the 'crossed races' of France against the racial purists' accusation of hybrid degeneration; and to distance the 'highest' races in the 'human series' from proximity to the 'most inferior'. Here, too, Broca worked by animal analogy, mapping a four-stage taxonomy of 'degrees of hybridity' according to the relative fecundity of first-generation hybrids: agénésique, 'quite infertile'; dysgénésique, 'almost entirely sterile'; paragénésique, 'partly fertile'; eugénésique, 'fully fertile'.^[129] Transposed to humanity, this classification condensed his deductions that there were 'very varied' degrees of homœogénésie, 'sexual affinity', in the human genus, resulting in 'very unequal' degrees of hybridity; and that the 'more distant' the parent species, the more 'more defective' the hybrids. Given these premises, it is hardly surprising that Broca's scale of human hybridity spanned eugenesic unions between proximate European races; paragenesic unions of Europeans and Negroes; and purportedly dysgenesic unions between the 'two extremities of the human series' — the Anglo-Saxons, 'humanity's first race', and the Australians and Tasmanians, the 'two most inferior races'.^[130] In marked contrast, the monogenist Quatrefages (1868-9) devoted much of his 1869 anthropology course at the Muséum to refuting polygenism on the grounds that crossings of the most 'distant' human groups, such as Tasmanians or New Hollanders with Europeans, could produce fertile, viable mixed races.

Broca's 'theoretical antihumanism' (Blanckaert 2003b:60) was cloaked in a cynical scientistic rhetoric and logic. A political radical and opponent of slavery, he at once acknowledged a 'vast hiatus' in the 'animal ladder' between the highest apes and 'inferior' human types but bracketed this 'profession of faith' with a priori assertions that the Negro was physically 'intermediary' between the European and the ape while the Australians and Tasmanians were 'nearest the brute'. He deplored the contamination of science by religion and politics and yet hypocritically defended polygenism on the prejudicial grounds that its doctrine was not 'humiliating' to 'inferior' races, unlike the monogenist attribution of racial inequality to divine curse or degeneration from original perfection.^[131] Similarly, in advocating greater precision for the notoriously ambiguous term race (1859-60:608, 613), he differentiated its 'particular and exact' use to describe collections of physically similar individuals of plausible common descent (such as Arabs, Celts, Australians, Papouas), from its 'general and deceptive' application to classify a few broad 'natural groups' comprising all individuals with certain 'common characters' and some 'morphological affinity' (such as the Caucasic or Ethiopian races). The collection of characters common to such a group constituted its type but human types were 'fictive', 'ideal', heuristic 'abstractions' and should not be granted a 'real existence' as 'facts'. Yet, Broca himself used race haphazardly in both senses and consistently stands accused of reifying racial types.

The study of hybridity eventually impelled Broca to jettison entirely the 'classic' doctrine of the inalterability of species. In 1858, he had proposed hybridization as the sole motor for past specific change: actual species were permanent outcomes of 'fusions' and 'modifications' resulting from past 'crossings'. Agnostic about transmutation in 1866, he formally endorsed the principle of 'the evolution of organic forms' in 1870, echoing the celebrated quip that it was better to be 'an advanced ape than a degenerated Adam'.^[132] Notwithstanding this conversion, Broca did not renounce polygenism and coined the term 'polygenic transformism' to designate the principle — rather bizarrely attributed to Buffon (1766:358) — that living beings as evolving 'natural products' had 'multiple origins' and multiple 'primordial forms'.^[133]

If Broca's formulation was more compromise than resolution with respect to the war over human origins and the challenge of evolutionism, a French synthesis of sorts was mooted by his self-avowed disciple and institutional successor, the physician-anthropologist Paul Topinard (1830-1911) whose first significant anthropological publications were detailed surveys of craniological or ethnographic materials on Aboriginal Tasmanians (1868) and Australians (1872).^[134] Though no less committed than Broca to the paradigm of a highly physical anthropologie rooted firmly in morphology and comparative craniometry, Topinard was polygenist more by default than conviction. He reasoned (like Wallace) that, while the great human ideal types (Mongol, Australian, European, and Negro) undoubtedly had the 'morphological value of species', the vast expansion in the time span of human existence had rendered irrelevant the old controversy over origins — the question, he complained, left him cold, though he glimpsed, 'in a prodigiously distant past, a generic trunk common to all humanity'.^[135] A convinced transformist, Topinard asserted French theoretical precedence by tracing evolution's intellectual genealogy directly from Lamarck to Darwin and reconfiguring transformism as historically the 'first' opposition to classic monogenism, more 'serious' than polygenism, rather than as the subsequent dialectical synthesis it looked like to the English.^[136]

As ever, the question of interracial unions was pivotal in this new series of debates on the classificatory status of human diversity. Broca's contentious hypothesis of very unequal degrees of human hybridity was sceptically received by English Darwinians and quietly ignored by Topinard. Huxley and Darwin brought their usual pragmatic mix of emphatic naturalism and racialized philanthropy to the matter. Both rejected the extremist position that 'mixed breeds of mankind' were infertile or unviable and cited in evidence the Pitcairn Islanders, thriving progeny of English sailors and Tahitian women. Darwin refuted claims that Australian and Tasmanian women could not procreate with European men with the equally global assertion that 'the half-castes are killed by the pure blacks'. He concluded that the 'races of man' were 'not sufficiently distinct to co-exist without fusion'. Huxley admitted both his predisposition to expect some infertility between the 'extreme modifications' of humanity but lack of 'any satisfactory proof' of its reality.^[137] Topinard sketched a classification of species parallel to Broca's: 'hostile' (no fertile crossings), 'intermediate' (no sustained posterity), and 'friendly' (indefinitely fertile). But although he identified 'different degrees' of interracial fertility, 'the closest more, the more distant relatively less', Topinard nonetheless encompassed the entire human genus, Australians included, within the third category. He proposed racial crossing as the 'mechanism' that had at once produced 'the infinite diversity of present races' and ensured the survival of traces of purportedly extinct types, such as Tasmanians, in their hybrid descendants.^[138]

Arguably, Topinard's most important contribution to his science was his attempt to specify and dereify the anthropological notion of race. In a detailed history of the concept (1879), he showed how the terms race and espèce were plucked from common usage to serve the abstract taxonomic needs of eighteenth-century naturalists and quickly concretized as real entities. But historians, ethnologists, and linguists confused matters by using race in an expanded 'public' sense, conflated with the social and political idea of peuple, 'people', in ignorance or defiance of the anthropological verity that races were physically determined constituants of peuples.^[139] Thanks to countless migrations, crossings, and fusions over innumerable generations, there were no pure races, only types: assemblages of 'common characters' identified in peuples by observation or measurement and subject to the vicissitudes of the struggle for existence — fusion, absorption, disappearance, atavism. It was peuples large or small that anthropologists actually studied and the type, like the race, was an abstraction without 'indefinite permanence'.^[140] Yet in the end, Topinard's demand for a more systematic terminology petered out in limp re-endorsement of his 'master', Broca's, partition of anthropology between the science of man in general and the science of human races, or ethnology, in particular; while Topinard's clarion call to dematerialize race as an idea, not a reality, came to grief on his own and his colleagues' inability to shake their conviction that 'the determination of race' was 'anthropology par excellence'.^[141]