Meanwhile, in natural history in Britain, the threat of uncompromising physicalism or proto-polygenist heterodoxy emanating mainly from France was partly repulsed until the mid-nineteenth century by the ideological dominance of Evangelical humanitarianism.^[122] Evangelical attitudes to 'pagans' were more bleak and rigid than had been the optimistic Christian humanism of Reinhold Forster and other Enlightenment Reformed Protestants such as Blumenbach, but British Evangelicals shared their fervent commitment to the biblical doctrine of human unity. In Britain before 1850, the science of man was strongly comparative and linguistic, befitting a longstanding philanthropic bent and the label 'ethnology' that it bore in the 1840s. Both values owed much to the influence of Prichard, a devout Anglican of Quaker origins, a follower of Blumenbach, and doyen of British ethnologists for more than thirty years until his death in 1848 (Stocking 1973; 1987:48-53). Prichard was nonetheless not immune to the infiltration of racialized logic and vocabulary into mainstream discourses: by mid-century, physical differences and their supposed moral corollaries were racially definitive for most western Europeans, including humanitarians.^[123]

Prichard's work bears a marked antipodean imprint. George Stocking, Jr. (1973:xxxv), who edited a modern reprinting of the first edition of Researches into the Physical History of Man (1813),^[124] stressed his particular debt to the Cook voyage literature. In this edition, Prichard accorded an axial interpretive position to 'the South-Sea and Indian Islanders' who, he supposed, were 'all propagated from one original' but were 'divided into two principal classes': one, 'Eastern Negroes or Papuas', were 'savages' and probably 'aborigines'; the other, unnamed, inhabited the islands of modern Polynesia and Micronesia and the Malay Archipelago, were 'more civilized', and resembled Europeans. In a long empirical section, these Oceanian people served as primary evidence for his then startling but shortlived thesis that 'the primitive stock of men were Negroes' and that the 'evolution of white varieties in black races of men', via the 'effects of Cultivation or Civilization', was a universal 'process of Nature'. Invoking the particular authority of William Anderson (?1748‑78), surgeon-naturalist on Cook's second and third voyages, Prichard argued that the South Sea Islanders, broadly conceived to embrace the Papuas and the New Hollanders, were all 'branches of one stock' but provided 'a fair example of the greatest diversity of the human species, depending on the condition of society, and on the mode of life' rather than 'the influence of climate'.^[125]

The glut of information pouring into Europe about non-white people globally meant exponential growth in the length of subsequent editions of Researches but a steady decline in the relative empirical significance of Oceania. Yet, in the two-volume second edition, Prichard (1826, I:365-468) continued to foreground the region as the world's most prolific source of 'facts' on the physical history of mankind. He now split its 'races of men' into three 'classes': the 'black or swarthy' Papuas had 'woolly hair', remained 'barbarous and unimproved', and occupied New Guinea, the islands as far eastward as Fiji, parts of the Malay Archipelago, and Van Diemen's Land; the 'fairer and less barbarous' Polynesians inhabited modern Polynesia and Micronesia and much of the Malay Archipelago; while the 'Haraforas' or 'Alfoërs' (Alfourous) were 'black', 'extremely barbarous', had 'straight or lank hair', were 'indigenous' to the Malay Archipelago, and occupied New Holland. However, Prichard (1826, I:480-3) ultimately qualified this differentiating agenda by allowing that the Papuan and Polynesian races had some 'remarkable characters in common', notably in language and skull conformation.

Even in the five-volume third edition (1836-47), the 'Oceanic races' retain significant heuristic value, though Prichard no longer considered them 'one stock' but separated them into three 'remarkably' different 'principal groupes'. Only the far-flung 'Malayo-Polynesian tribes' comprised a 'particular race or family of nations' and were relatively 'civilised', though the 'lower class' had 'approximated towards the character of the savage races' through the 'agency of the climate'. His two remaining groups together comprised the 'black races' of 'Kelænonesia' but were related only through 'uncertain' Asian origin and some behavioural and physical 'resemblance'. The 'Pelagian or Oceanic Negroes' were physically very diverse and 'very inferior' to the Malayo-Polynesians in 'arts and civilisation'. The 'Alfourous' or Australians had a 'peculiar' head shape and no linguistic affinity to the other Oceanic races. These races continued collectively to exemplify 'almost every physical variety of the human species' but were now mobilized in support of a standard climatic-environmental causal theory as putative products of 'the agency of climate and physical influences' on a single migrating species — a position Prichard had first adopted in 1826.^[126]

Oceanic voyage literature remains prominent in the third edition, especially that addressing the racial conundrum of the Papuas. An exhaustive survey of writings on the subject in French and English prompted Prichard to make them 'a particular division' of the Oceanic Negroes, 'a genuine and peculiar' race limited to New Guinea, New Britain, New Ireland, and the Solomons and differentiated both from the 'mixed people' of Waigeo and nearby islands and from the Fijians who, 'though a black race', exceeded the 'more civilised and fairer' Tongans in 'vigour and enterprise'. In the Preface to this edition, Prichard complained of the prevalence of the doctrine of 'an original diversity of races' in recent treatises — 'even' by Cuvier — and in works by 'the most celebrated scientific travellers', including navigators and naturalists on recent French expeditions to Oceania. This was an allusion to Dumont d'Urville, Lesson, and Quoy and Gaimard whose writings Prichard nonetheless reproduced verbatim or paraphrased despite disavowing their purported racial theories. His ongoing obsession with the threat to human unity posed by polygeny presumably sensitized him to their prevarications on the issue, since neither they nor Cuvier openly professed belief in plural human origins.^[127]

The grand design of Prichard's magnum opus remained unchanged over more than thirty years: he set himself with extraordinary industry and persistence to prove the orthodoxy that human physical differences arose 'from the variation of one primitive type' and that 'all the races of men are of one species', thus refuting the polygenist heresy that such differences were original or 'permanent and therefore specific characters'.^[128] There are nonetheless clear shifts in language, tone, and emphasis from the first to the third editions. Though he consistently avoided systematic taxonomy of the human populations of Oceania, Prichard's division into classes became steadily more racialized. The 1813 text hinges on a broad, historically mutable distinction between savage and civilized while the epithets applied to so-called savages are mostly descriptive and fairly detached. In contrast, the third edition normalizes invidious racial terminology and discriminations: the 'black races in Oceanic Negroland' were 'ferocious and sullen, of savage and menacing aspect'; their 'physical characters' were 'very different from those of the agile, graceful, and comparatively fair Polynesians'; they included some which 'exceed in ugliness the most ill-favoured brood of the African forests, whom they rival in the sooty blackness of their complexion'. Even more disturbing than Prichard's by now conventionally racialized language is the intimation of racial displacement in his conjectural history of the Oceanic 'nations': the black races were the 'aborigines' of Kelænonesia, its 'immemorial and primitive inhabitants' who had spread across the 'austral islands' long before the arrival of the Malayo-Polynesians and were, by implication, exterminated, conquered, or dispersed inland by them.^[129]