SummaryThe relationship between travel, travel narrative, and the enterprise of natural history is explored, focusing on activities associated with the early Royal Society. In an era of expanding travel, for colonial, diplomatic, trade, and missionary purposes, reports of nature's effects proliferated, both in oral and written forms. Naturalists intent on compiling a comprehensive history of such phenomena, and making them useful in the process, readily incorporated these reports into their work. They went further by trying to direct the course of (...) travel to suit their ends, but the complex story of how travel influenced the direction of study cannot be told without acknowledging the influence of objects acquired in a random fashion, arriving in a miscellany off returning ships. Travel writing complemented the activity of documenting nature's history, supplementing the range of available testimony. Such accounts of travel became an accepted source for information, cross-references, and queries, ostensibly eliminating error and advancing knowledge. The difficulty of identifying and classifying objects added to the importance of these reports; furthermore, the scope for attending to prodigies created the grounds for accepting tales of marvels and monsters. The fluid exchange between travel, narrative, and natural history often masked rather than exposed problems of belief, testimony, and evidence, perpetuating an economy of error in which knowledge was both advanced and retarded. (shrink)

This paper examines the debate engendered in ethnological and anthropological circles by Darwin's Origin of Species and its effects. The debate was more about the nature of human diversity than about transmutation. By 1859 many polygenists thought monogenism had been clearly shown to be an antiquated and essentially religious concept. Yet the doctrine of natural selection gave rise to a ‘new monogenism’. Proponents of polygenism such as James Hunt claimed natural selection had finally excluded monogenism, but Thomas Huxley, the most (...) prominent exponent of the new monogenism, claimed it amalgamated the ‘best’ of both polygenism and monogenism. What it did provide was an explanation for the irreversible inequality of races, while it maintained that all humans were of one species. This bolstered belief in the innate superiority of the Caucasians over other peoples. The effect was finally to sever British ethnology from its evangelical monogenist roots. More subtly and surprisingly, it provided support in Church circles for a move away from the ideal of the ‘Native Church’. (shrink)