![[EVOLUTION] WHITE, CHARLES. An account of the regular gradation in man, and in different animals and vegetables; and from the former to the latter...](/sites/default/files/styles/auction_slider/public/images/lots/2020-06-17/1388120.jpg?itok=h-YpNOny)
Lot Details
Lot 87
[EVOLUTION] WHITE, CHARLES. An account of the regular gradation in man, and in different animals and vegetables; and from the former to the latter...
London : printed for C. Dilly, 1799. First edition. Period quarter leather, marbled sides, all edges sprinkled. 10 5/8 x 8 1/2 inches (27 x 21.5 cm); xii, 138, [1],cxl-clxvi, 139-146 pp., 4 plates printed in bistre (three folding). Binding rubbed, text toned, plates a bit foxed as usual.
White, a competent surgeon and obstetrician, was a researcher into polygenism, the theory that human races are of different evolutionary origins. The roman-numbered appendix to his work (cxl-clxvi) draws on the work of Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, whose work in comparative anatomy and anthropology (a field that Blumenbach largely created) informs White's conjectures. This was the chief 18th century attempt to explain the anatomical differences between man and the great apes (at least, in English). Unfortunately. it is also the basis for much subsequent scientific racism. See Stephen Jay Gould The Mismeasure of Man; ESTC T26909; Norman 2234.
C From the Collection of Quentin Keynes; Gift to his American doctor
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