Histoire Naturelle du Genre Humain, Nouvelle Edition, Augmentee et entierement refondue, avec figures by Virey, julien-Joseph - 1824

Paris: Crochard, 1824. Second edition.

1824 PRE-DARWINIAN ILLUSTRATED TREATISE ON ORIGIN OF HUMAN RACES BY FRENCH POLYGENIST, SIGNED BY AUTHOR, COPY OF NOTED AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST.

Three hardbound volumes 8 inches tall, 3/4 leather binding with marbled paper covered boards, armorial bookplate of H.L. Shapiro to front paste down of each volume. Vol. I, ink signature, J J Virey on half title page, [iv], i-xl, 514 pp, 1 uncolored and 5 handcolored plates; Vol. II, [iv], i-iii, 431 pp, 2 colored plates; Vol. III, [iv], i-iii, 534, Errata, list of titles by same author. Light wear to covers, Vol. I expertly rebacked with retention of most of original spine, bindings tight, scattered light foxing and browning to page edges, pages clean and unmarked, plates bright, very good minus.

JULIEN-JOSEPH VIREY (1775 –1846) was a French physician and anthropologist. After becoming a protégé of Antoine Parmentier he wrote a major work on the theory of polygeny, Histoire Naturelle du Genre Humain [The Natural History of Man] (1801), which was expanded in a new edition in 1824 (offered here). He participated in the reissue of the works of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. Virey was an early advocate of transmutation of species, proposing a direct descent of humans from apes. He was highly critical of the ideas of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and supported an evolutionary history of life on earth. He was a polygenist, proposing two human species (the "White" and "Black"), divided into six chromatic races. One group consisted of dark-skinned peoples such as Africans which he situated closer to apes than the other of Europeans, American Indians and light-skinned peoples. The work was translated into English with a pro-slavery bias by J. H. Guenebault and published as Natural History of the Negro Race by D. J. Dowling in Charleston, S.C. in 1837. In his preface, Guenebault states, "Why has God colored so differently and distinctively all human races? . . . The experience of the past has proved, and proves also every day, that the negro race cannot be formed under any monarchical or republican government, and that negroes are incapable of governing themselves without falling into excesses."

PROVENANCE: HARRY LIONEL SHAPIRO (1902 – 1990), an American anthropologist and eugenicist, made a number of significant contributions to biological anthropology, most notably his inquiries into racial mixture and the role of the environment and geography in determining racial characteristics. He also contributed to the foundations of forensic anthropology in the United States and is further distinguished by being the first in an influential series of doctorates produced under the aegis of Earnest Albert Hooton (1887-1954) at Harvard between 1925 and the early 1950s, a generation that contributed significantly to the development of academic physical anthropology in the United States. While he was a senior at Harvard he was awarded a graduate fellowship from Yale in 1923 to pursue a genetic study of the descendants of the mutineers of HMS Bounty. Shapiro was a student of Earnest Hooton at Harvard University. After completing his graduate work in 1926 he went to work at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and while there conducted a few field trips. Shapiro was appointed associate curator at the American Museum of Natural History in 1931 and full curator in 1942, the year he succeeded Clark Wissler as chair of the Department of Anthropology. He remained department chair until 1970. Shapiro concurrently taught at Columbia University as an adjunct Professor of Anthropology from 1938 to 1973. Shapiro was a founding member of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in 1930 (AAPA) and between 1935 and 1939 served a term as its secretary and subsequently as vice-president (1941–42). He served as president of the American Anthropological Association in 1948, and president of the American Ethnological Society from 1942–43. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 1949 and served as chairman of the anthropology section from 1953 to 1957. He was president of the American Eugenics Society from 1955–62.

FROM SHAPIRO'S NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES BIOGRAPHY: "Shapiro refuted the claims of such workers as Charles B. Davenport who had concluded from their study of cross-breeding that Jamaican mulattoes were biologically and intellectually inferior to their ancestral groups. Finding no basis for such a pernicious thesis, Shapiro argued that the 'dangers' of miscegenation were not only unfounded but that there was every reason to suppose that the production of racial mosaics had been an integral factor in the history of human civilization."