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Studies of Skin Color
in the Early Royal Society
Cristina Malcolmson
Boyle, Cavendish, Swift

Studies of Skin Color
in the Early Royal Society

Literary and Scientific Cultures
of Early Modernity
Series editors:
Mary Thomas Crane, Department of English, Boston College, USA
Henry Turner, Department of English, Rutgers University, USA
For more than a decade now, Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity
has provided a forum for groundbreaking work on the relations between
literary and scientific discourses in Europe, during a period when both fields
were in a crucial moment of historical formation. We welcome proposals that
address the many overlaps between modes of imaginative writing typical of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—poetics, rhetoric, prose narrative, dramatic
production, utopia—and the vocabularies, conceptual models, and intellectual
methods of newly emergent ‘scientific’ fields such as medicine, astronomy,
astrology, alchemy, psychology, mapping, mathematics, or natural history. In
order to reflect the nature of intellectual inquiry during the period, the series is
interdisciplinary in orientation and publishes monographs, edited collections,
and selected critical editions of primary texts relevant to an understanding of the
mutual implication of literary and scientific epistemologies.

Studies of Skin Color
in the Early Royal Society
Boyle, Cavendish, Swift
Cristina Malcolmson
Bates College, USA

© Cristina Malcolmson 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Cristina Malcolmson has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,
to be identified as the author of this work.
Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company
Wey Court East 110 Cherry Street
Union Road Suite 3-1
Farnham Burlington, VT 05401-3818
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www.ashgate.com
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Malcolmson, Cristina.
Studies of skin color in the early Royal Society: Boyle, Cavendish, Swift. – (Literary and
scientific cultures of early modernity)
1. Royal Society (Great Britain) – History. 2. Human skin color – Social aspects – Great Britain –
History. 3. Racism – Great Britain – History. 4. Great Britain – Race relations – History.
I. Title II. Series
305.8’00941’0903-dc23
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Malcolmson, Cristina.
Studies of skin color in the early Royal Society: Boyle, Cavendish, Swift / by Cristina
Malcolmson.
pages cm. — (Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7546-3778-3 (hardcover: alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-4094-6216-3 (ebook)—ISBN
978-1-4724-0520-3 (epub)
1. Royal Society (Great Britain) 2. Human skin color—Social aspects—England. 3. Literature
and science—Great Britain—History—17th century. 4. Literature and science—Great Britain—
History—18th century. I. Title.
Q41.L86M35 2013
305.800941’09033—dc23
2013007748
ISBN 9780754637783 (hbk)
ISBN 9781409462163 (ebk)
ISBN 9781472405203 (ePUB)

For Peter Malcolmson, the scientist in the family.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgements xi
List of Abbreviations xiii
Introduction 1
I. Science and Colonialism 8
II. Pre-Adamism 10
III. Robert Boyle and “the Empire of Man over the inferior
Creatures” 15
1 Race and the Experimental Method in the Society 29
I. Boyle on Colors 31
II. March 1661 Queries 37
III. The “entire SKIN of a MOOR” 43
IV. Queries on Skin Color and the Discourse of “Observation and
Experience” 48
2 Discussions of Race and the Emergence of Polygenesis in the Society 65
I. Black Blood vs. Leeuwenhoek’s “Little Scales” 66
II. Bernier’s Influence 69
III. Richard Waller’s “Table of Coloures” 71
IV. “The Complexions of Mankind” 72
V. “A Distinct Race of Men”: Hans Sloane and Abraham Hill 75
VI. John Woodward vs. L.P. 86
3 Boyle, Biblical Monogenesis, and Slavery 93
I. Boyle and Pre-Adamism 93
II. Boyle and John Clayton 96
III. Boyle, Morgan Godwyn, and the Draft Bills in the Boyle
Papers 103
IV. Biblical Monogenesis as Imperial Practice 111
4 Race, Gender, and the Response to Boyle in Cavendish’s
Blazing World 113
I. Polygenesis as Satire in the Voyages to the Moon 115
II. Polygenesis in The Blazing World 123
III. Race in Observations upon Experimental Philosophy 135
IV. The Color of Adam 139
5 Race, Gender, and the Imagination in the Philosophical Transactions 147
6 Gulliver’s Travels and Studies of Skin Color in the Society 169

Studies of Skin Color in the Early Royal Societyviii
Conclusion: The Royal Society and Atlantic Studies 189
Appendix: Jonathan Swift’s Debt to Margaret Cavendish 195
Bibliography 205
Index 225

List of Illustrations
Frontispiece © The Royal Society. Richard Waller, “Tabula Colorum
Physiologica tam Mixtorum quam Simplicium Quadrilinguis una cum
Speciminibus Adjectus” or “A Catalogue of Simple and Mixt Colours,
with a Specimen of Each Colour Prefixt to Its Proper Name,” from the
original Philosophical Transactions, “Vol. XVI. For the Years 1686 and
1687. London: Printed by Joseph Streater [1688],” pp. 24–5.
1.1 © The British Library Board. G.7037, opposite 1. John Smith,
Generall Historie of Virginia (London, 1624). 40
1.2 © The British Library Board. G,7037, opposite 1. Detail from
John Smith, Generall Historie of Virginia (London, 1624), “The
Sasquesahanougs are a Gyant like people & thus atyred.” 41

This page has been left blank intentionally

Acknowledgements
I have many to thank for their help on this book. My first debt is to the 1998–99
seminar at Bates College on “Women and Scientific Literacy”; particular thanks go
to Pamela Baker, Rebecca Herzig, and Bonnie Shulman. Bates has been remarkably
generous in funding this project through a Phillips Fellowship, a Lincoln and
Gloria Ladd Faculty Research Grant, several Faculty Development Grants, and
sabbatical time. I also heartily thank the Institute of English Studies, University of
London, including Warwick Gould, Sandra Clarke, and Elizabeth Maslen, for their
warmth in welcoming me as a Visiting Research Fellow in 2005. I am very grateful
indeed for the collegiality I have enjoyed in London, and particularly for advice
on the history of science, especially from Stephen Clucas, Michael Hunter, Harriet
Knight, Rhodri Lewis, and Norris Saakwa-Mante. Ruth Paley taught me a great
deal about the history of colonialism and slavery. In the States, my debts are many.
I thank the following for giving me the opportunity to present my work: Diana
Henderson, Aaron Kitch, Natasha Korda, Marina Leslie, Charles Nero, Susan
O’Malley, Frank Palmeri, Jeremy Popkin, Sarah Rivett, Homer Stavely, Claude
Summers, and Mihoko Suzuki; those who attended these events offered wonderful
comments. Margaret Ferguson and Ania Loomba provided much needed insight
and support. Anna Battigelli, Sara Mendelson, Hilda Smith, and Mihoko Suzuki
helped me find my way in Cavendish studies. Richard Abrams, Elizabeth Eames,
Michael Hunter, Lillian Nayder, Frank Palmeri, and Norris Saakwa-Mante read
drafts of my chapters, and provided wonderful advice. Many thanks are due to
Thomas Hayward for his Latin translations. I am deeply grateful to Erika Gaffney,
Publishing Manager at Ashgate, as well as to Whitney Feininger, Assistant Editor,
and Seth F. Hibbert, Senior Editor, at Ashgate. Finally I owe a great deal to past
and present colleagues at Bates who have encouraged me to recognize the links
between early modern England, Africa, and slavery in the Americas: Christina
Brinkley, Charles Carnegie, Elizabeth Eames, Leslie Hill, Charles Nero, William
Pope.L, Patrick Rivers, and Carole Taylor.
I thank the president and board of the Royal Society of London for permission
to quote from the Boyle Papers, and other manuscripts in the Royal Society
Library. I particularly want to thank the following past and present librarians at the
Royal Society Library for their expert help: Clara Anderson, Rupert Baker, Martin
Carr, Joanna Corden, Joanna Hopkins, Jill Jackson, and especially Christine
Woollett. I am very much indebted to them. I am also very grateful to the librarians
at the Rare Books and Music Reading Room and the Manuscript Reading Room
at the British Library, the National Archives in Kew, and the Manuscripts and
Special Collections at the University of Nottingham. Material throughout the book
appeared in “‘The Explication of Whiteness and Blackness’: Skin Color and the
Physics of Color in the Works of Robert Boyle and Margaret Cavendish” in Fault

Studies of Skin Color in the Early Royal Societyxii
Lines and Controversies in the Study of Seventeenth-Century Literature, Claude J.
Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (eds), (Columbia: University of Missouri Press,
December 2002), pp. 187–203. Chapter 1 appeared in a shortened form in “Race
and the Experimental Method in the Early Royal Society” in the International
Journal of Science in Society, 1:4 (2010), and appears by permission of Common
Ground Publishing. Material from Chapter 3 appeared in Ruth Paley, Cristina
Malcolmson, and Michael Hunter, “Parliament and Slavery, 1660-c.1710,”
Slavery and Abolition 31/2 (June 2010): 257–81, and is reprinted by permission
of Taylor and Francis Ltd. Chapter 6 is reprinted by permission of the publishers
from “Gulliver’s Travels and Studies of Skin Color in the Royal Society,” in
Frank Palmeri (ed.), Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth-Century Britain:
Representation, Hybridity, Ethics (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 49–66.

List of Abbreviations
BL British Library
BP Boyle Papers, Royal Society Library
Cl.P Classified Papers, Royal Society Library
CSPD Calendar of State Papers, Domestic
EL Early Letters, Royal Society Library
FRS Fellow of the Royal Society
JBC Journal Book Copy, Royal Society Library
JBO Journal Book Original, Royal Society Library
ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
OED Oxford English Dictionary
PRO Public Record Office, National Archives, Kew
PT Philosophical Transactions

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Introduction
But whether I think this Modification of the light to be perform’d by Mixing
it with Shades, or by Varying the Proposition of the Progress and Rotation of
the Cartesian Globuli Coelestes, or by some other way which I am not now to
mention, I pretend not here to Declare.
—Robert Boyle, Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664)
1
… as for the ordinary sort of men in that part of the world where the Emperor
resided, they were of several complexions … some of a grass-green, some of a
scarlet, some of an orange-colour, etc. Which colours and complexions, whether
they were made by the bare reflection of light, without the assistance of small
particles, or by the help of well-ranged and ordered atoms; or by a continual
agitation of little globules; or by some pressing and reacting motion, I am not
able to determine.
—Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World (1666)
2
[Negroes are] a Race of People who appear to be different from the rest of
Mankind; their Hair being woolly, and their Colour black; their Noses flat,
and their Lips large; but whether these are an original Race, or whether the
Difference arises from the Climate, the Vapours of that particular Soil, the
Manner of breeding their Children, and from the mothers forming of their
Features, is not here determined, tho’ there are some curious facts relating to it
mention’d in the Journal.
—Francis Moore, Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa (1738)
3
I quote these passages to suggest that Robert Boyle’s interest in color and
Margaret Cavendish’s satire of it provide evidence for a set of studies of skin color
1
Robert Boyle, Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours, in Michael
Hunter and Edward B. Davis (eds), The Works of Robert Boyle (14 vols, London: Pickering
& Chatto, 1999), vol. 4, p. 59. Boyle (1627–1691) was a natural philosopher famous
for innovations in chemistry, a leading advocate for the new experimental science, and
an administrator and patron for Protestant missionary efforts in the English colonies and
elsewhere.
2
Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World and Other Writings, Kate Lilley (ed.),
second edition (London: Penguin Books, 1994), p. 133. Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle
(c.1623–1673) was a natural philosopher, poet, playwright, and one of the first proponents
of atomism. She opposed the experimental philosophy of the Royal Society.
3
Francis Moore, “Letter to the Publisher,” in Travels into the Inland Parts of
Africa (London: Edward Cave, 1738), pp. xi–xii. Moore (c.1708–c.1756) was a factor,
or purchasing agent, for the slave-trading Royal African Company at St. James Fort at
the mouth of the Gambia River, and later a storekeeper for a settlement in Georgia. He
published his journals on these travels.

Studies of Skin Color in the Early Royal Society2
in the Royal Society from 1660 to 1700.
4
These studies had a far reaching effect
in evoking commentary on the causes of blackness from European travelers and
colonists, as the quotation from Francis Moore demonstrates. It is well known
that Boyle’s Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours contains a chapter
on “The Cause of the Blackness of those many Nations, which by one common
Name we are wont to call Negroes.” What is less well known is that, in the Blazing
World, Cavendish jokes about the conflation of the physics of color and the causes
of skin color in Boyle’s work. In mimicking his sentence, Cavendish highlights
the tentativeness that characterized the experimental method as developed by the
Society, in which observation and experiment, as well as a search for “matters of
fact,” were far more important than any theory or explanation of these facts. Boyle
proposes a hypothesis about the causes of color, teaching that the “Modification of
the light” produces “that Kind of Sensation, Men commonly call Colour,” but he
refrains from accepting any theory about how it happens. The same method used
in his experiments on colors motivates his chapter on skin color: “to satisfie myself
in matters of fact … it being my Present Work to deliver rather matters Historical
than Theoryes.”
5
To satirize Boyle’s conflation of skin color with the physics of
color, Cavendish creates people with various colors of the spectrum, and makes
fun of the number of optical theories offered by prominent natural philosophers
to explain color. Despite her satire of the experimental method, the passage from
Francis Moore displays the extent to which that method influenced travelers,
traders, and colonial settlers in the coming decades. In an introductory passage
summarizing the different peoples and areas of Africa he had observed in his work
for the Royal African Company, Moore suddenly adopts a philosophical tone and
comments on a debate important to the Society.
6
Listing the stereotypical facial
characteristics attributed to black Africans in all entries in the debate, including
Boyle’s, Moore signals his knowledge of the literature, his desire to participate,
and his awareness that caution in the process is an experimental virtue. Moore in
fact suggests in his work that he believes black Africans are not an “Original race,”
but rather one subset in the larger race of mankind. Here, however, he makes it
clear that he knows what will catch the Society’s eye: “there are some curious facts
relating to it mention’d in the Journal.”
7

4
The Royal Society was the first scientific institution in England. It was founded in
1660 to promote the new experimental science, and given a royal charter by Charles II in
1662.
5
Boyle, Works, vol. 4, pp. 5, 85.
6
The Royal African Company had a monopoly on the slave trade between Africa and
the English colonies in the Caribbean and North America from 1672 to 1698, and continued
trading until 1752.
7
Moore had been planning to report to the Royal Society on the tongue and eyes of
the chameleon, but, on returning to London, he visited the collection of Hans Sloane, the
Secretary of the Society, and found the tongue “preserved in Spirits,” since “nothing had
escaped [Sloane’s] Curiosity,” p. 107. He also mentions that the claim that the chameleon
lives on the air is a “vulgar error,” paraphrasing Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica

Introduction 3
Moore’s use of the term “race” is telling. For Moore, the word does not
necessarily refer to the modern sense of biological difference, whereby groups of
people are categorized according to physical characteristics, and ranked along a
hierarchical scale, from superior to inferior. This theory became the majority view
within the scientific community during the nineteenth century.
8
Moore’s first use
of the term, “[Negroes are] a Race of People,” suggests rather the older meaning
of family or stock, as outlined by the Oxford English Dictionary.
9
Nevertheless he
considers a prototype for the belief in biological difference: “whether these are an
original Race, or whether the Difference arises from the Climate.” By “original,”
Moore refers to a belief that black Africans were inherently different from the
beginning of creation.
10
He seems to be alluding to theories of pre-Adamism, which
claimed that God created men before Adam, including Ethiopians and American
Indians. According to this view, men created before Adam were different from
white Europeans in a religious and physical sense.
11
Moore implies strongly that
the alternative to status as an “original Race” was derivation from the original
progenitor, Adam. However, central to this perspective is the assumption that
Adam was not originally black, but that black Africans developed over time out
of Adam’s seed through the effects of climate, the vapors of the soil, upbringing.
Moore’s word choice should clarify that discussions in European natural
philosophy about the differences between population groups do not bear much
resemblance to modern accounts. This is one reason why it is difficult to tell whether
race and racism existed from the time of the Greeks, as some argue, whether it
emerged in the fifteenth century with the beginning of European colonial slavery, or
whether it came into being as the result of slavery, in the later seventeenth century.
12

(1646), because Moore has seen them eat flies (p. 106). Moore knows how the debate
on skin color has progressed since Browne’s chapters on “Of the Blackness of Negroes”
in Pseudodoxia, since Browne does not consider the possibility that black Africans are a
different race. See Moore’s comments on the “character of the Natives,” Travels, pp. 120ff.
8
Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960 (Hamden:
Archon Books, 1982), pp. 1–19.
9
Oxford English Dictionary, (hereafter OED), “race,” n
6
, I.1.a: “A group of people
belonging to the same family and descended from a common ancestor; a house, family,
kindred,” and I.2.b: “A tribe, nation, or people, regarded as of common stock,” with
examples beginning in 1547 and 1572 (http://www.oed.com/ , accessed September 4, 2011).
10
This use of the word may be linked not only to pre-Adamism, but to “race” as root;
see n
2
in the OED, with an etymology linked to “Anglo-Norman raiz, rais and Middle
French raiz root … classical Latin rādīc-, rādīx.” Thanks to Richard Abrams for this idea.
11
For more information on pre-Adamism, see section II in the Introduction.
12
On Greek and Roman racism, see Bernard Isaac, The Invention of Racism in
Classical Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), and Miriam Eliav-Feldon,
Benjamin Isaac, Joseph Ziegler (eds), The Origins of Racism in the West (Cambridge,
2009). Jan Nederveen Pierterse assesses positive and negative images from 2500 BC to
1500 in White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 18–29. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva argues that “race

Studies of Skin Color in the Early Royal Society4
Although I tend to agree with the last proposition, and the book will be providing
some evidence for it, this is not my major goal. The more pressing questions in the
book are, why did individuals in the Royal Society begin to use the word “race” at
the end of the seventeenth century to refer to innate differences between population
groups? And why was this question “particularly of the Negroes?”
13

I will argue in this book that the word began to be used to refer to inherent
differences because it served the colonial interests of the members, and that an
emphasis on a search for matters of fact kept them from recognizing this. The
result was an institutional framework not yet providing but nevertheless ripe
for the authorization of the theory of multiple races. Between 1660 and 1700,
largely through the energetic efforts of Henry Oldenburg, the Society developed
a widespread system of contacts, including European travelers, ambassadors, and
colonists in foreign countries, to gather the information needed to construct what
Bacon called “a Natural and Experimental History,” and the request for information
nearly always included questions about skin color.
14
The passages on skin color in
travel narratives began to be built according to the Society’s design, in which writers
debated the possible causes and often provided their own view. These passages
signaled the writers’ interest in gaining the attention of and perhaps membership in
the Society, and the Society at times responded. Originally, the Society called for
information on skin color from a wide range of regions, including Turkey, Japan,
and Morocco, as well as Guinea, Virginia, and East Hudson’s Bay. However, by
the end of the century, the number of sets of queries were significantly reduced,
and conversations about the issue at the meetings of the Society focused on black
Africans. Although no theory was accepted by all the members, some strongly
favored the idea that black skin was the result of blood that was colored black,
others cited the texture of skin, and, at one point, Hans Sloane brought in skulls as
a possible indicator of difference.
15

emerged as a category of human division in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries” in Racism
without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United
States (Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), pp. 9, 22; for the argument that European
colonial slavery produced race and racism, see Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (New
York: Russell and Russell, 1944); Russell R. Menard, Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery,
and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbadoes (Charlottesville: University of Virginia
Press, 2006), pp. 116–20; and Susan Dwyer Amussen, Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery
and the Transformation of English Society, 1640–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2007), pp. 12, 21–3.
13
Royal Society Library, Journal Book Copy , Vol. 7, March 19, 1689[90], p. 270.
14
Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, in James Spedding, R.L. Ellis, and D.D. Heath
(eds), Works (15 vols, Longman & Co.: London, 1857–1874), vol. 4, p. 127. Henry
Oldenburg (c.1619–1677) developed the nexus of correspondents as Secretary for the Royal
Society; he also took minutes and kept the books from 1662 until his death. He also worked
as a translator for Boyle, and kept Boyle informed about the activities of the Society.
15
Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753) is famous for his work as a physician to the monarchy;
his published work on the natural history of Jamaica; his collections of books, manuscripts,

Introduction 5
In this book, I hope to demonstrate how unstable the idea of race remained
in England at the end of the seventeenth century, and yet how extensively the
intertwined institutions of government, colonialism, the slave trade, and science
were collaborating to usher it into public view. Historians of colonialism disagree
about whether race and racism emerged as a result of slavery and capitalism, or
existed in some form before.
16
Some scholars contend that racialized discourse
appeared in the early modern period, and that such discourse had material
effects.
17
Similarly, some argue that the word “race” appeared in the fifteenth
century because of the beginning of European colonial slavery.
18
However, this
claim is made without justification or evidence, based on the problematic claim
that the word necessarily represents the thing, as we define it.
19
I agree with Eric
Williams, who argued long ago that “Slavery was not born of racism: rather,
racism was the consequence of slavery,” a view presented again recently by
Russell Menard and Susan Amussen.
20
The slave trade began for the British with
individual slaving ships in 1562, and it became a public, institutionalized part of
and specimens, which later became the basis for the British Museum; and his role in the
Royal Society as FRS (1685), Secretary (second, 1693; first, 1695–1713) and President
(1727–1741) (ODNB; Gavin de Beer, Sir Hans Sloane and the British Museum [London,
1953]; and E. St. John Brooks, The Great Collector and His Circle [London, 1953]). See
Chapter 2, section V, for a fuller discussion of Sloane.
16
Williams argued that racism resulted from slavery while Winthrop Jordan (White
over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro 1550–1812 [Williamsburg, Virginia:
University of North Carolina Press, 1968]) believed it began long before. See Theodore
Allen (The Invention of the White Race, [2 vols, London: Verso Books, 1994], I:1–24), for
a useful summary of the debate.
17
Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern
England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 261. See also Margo Hendricks and
Patricia Parker (eds), Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period (London:
Routledge, 1994), especially the introduction. Hendricks argues that race is not a “universal
paradigm” but “a mediated social practice” with a “complex history” in “Civility, Barbarism,
and Aphra Behn’s Widow Ranter,” in Women, “Race,” and Writing, p. 225, and in “Surveying
‘race’ in Shakespeare,” in Catherine M.S. Alexander and Stanley Wells (eds), Shakespeare
and Race (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 1–22. See also Margaret
Ferguson, “Juggling the Categories of Race, Class, and Gender: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko” in
Women, “Race,” and Writing, pp. 211–12. Also useful is Peter Erickson, “Representations
of Blacks and Blackness in the Renaissance,” Criticism 35 (1993): 499–527.
18
Bonilla-Silva, pp. 9, 22.
19
The term originally referred to family or lineage. See note 9.
20
Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, p. 7. Eric Williams (1911–1981) was a historian
and prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago. He received a PhD in History from Oxford
in 1938, and was a leader in the movement that established independence from British
colonial rule in 1962 (ODNB). Menard ( pp. 116–120) finds that the English colony
Barbados exported racialization to England and its other colonies in the second half of the
seventeenth century. Amussen ( pp. 12, 21–3) argues that slaveholding in general moved the
English toward “systematic racial thinking.”

Studies of Skin Color in the Early Royal Society6
the colonial structure in 1663.
21
Literary scholars like Kim Hall, Janet Adelman,
Ania Loomba, and Jonathan Burton rightly remind us of the virulence of early
modern bigotry, and the problem of characterizing the period as “race-neutral.”
22

Certainly emerging discourses of race energized forms of oppression like anti-
semitism and English massacres of the Irish and Indians. However, in the sixteenth
century, the discourses of race had yet to become systematized as they would be
through slavery and the scientific community in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. Some effort is needed to distinguish between the meaning of terms
like race and racism when used about the early modern period as opposed to the
eighteenth century. Using the terms as if they had the same meaning in all periods
collapses a history that needs to be told.
If the modern definition of racism as prejudice plus power is applied to the
early modern period, then the institutions of slavery and colonialism provided
the systemic power needed to turn prejudice into racism.
23
Thomas F. Gossett
distinguishes between the “institutions and relationships” based on racial
difference and the “race theories” that were used to justify them some time later.
24

Peter Kitson provides the useful distinction between the later “racialism” of
scientific beliefs of biological difference and the recurring “racism” of theories
of the inferiority of non-European peoples.
25
However, racism cannot explain
everything about theories of the inferiority of non-European peoples, since other
concepts, particularly religion, culture, and geography, were operating in equally
strong and often more significant ways. Roxann Wheeler sums it up, “The larger
21
Davies, K.C., The Royal African Company (New York: Atheneum, 1970), pp. 14–
15, 39–41.
22
Hall uses the term “race-neutral” in Things of Darkness, p. 261; Adelman finds the
anti-semitism of Merchant of Venice to be racist in Blood Relations: Christian and Jew in
Merchant of Venice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); in their introduction,
Ania Loomba and Jonathan Burton argue against the belief that there was a clear shift in
crucial categories of difference from religion and culture to race; they assert that all three
operated together during this period, in Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary
Companion, (New York: Palgrave, 2007). Adelman’s book on Merchant is as brilliant as
the rest of her work, but it builds a case for the racism expressed in the play toward Jessica,
Shylock, and Morocco by ignoring the attention and central position in her household that
Portia gives to Jessica in Act 3, scene 5. However, I agree with her that “racialized thinking
provided an easy remedy” for a “set of anxieties about sameness and difference” (p. 78-9).
23
Paula S. Rothenberg, Race, Class, and Gender in the United States, 3rd ed. (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), pp. 67–8. Thanks to Elizabeth Eames for pointing out this
issue.
24
Thomas Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (Dallas: Southern
Methodist University Press, 1963), pp. 16–17.
25
Peter Kitson, “‘Candid Reflections’: The Idea of Race in the Debate over the Slave
Trade and Slavery in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century” in Brycchan
Carey, Markman Ellis, and Sara Salih (eds), Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Britain
and its Colonies, 1760–1838 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 11–25.

Introduction 7
issue at stake … is how to theorize race in a way that accounts for its emergent
character.”
26
In histories of the development of race, it seems to me that it matters
if people at the time were using the term consciously to refer to innate differences
which could not be influenced by location or geography. Such an explicit use of
the term to refer to inherent difference signals that racialization has increased in
significant ways. Therefore, my purpose is not to discover instances of racism,
probably rife throughout this material, but rather developments that moved the
Society closer to accepting the modern idea of race. These developments were not
primarily intellectual but rather institutional: colonialism, slavery, the process of
gathering information on skin color.
27
I assume that the Royal Society was not the
cause of increasing racialization, but rather slavery in the Americas. Nevertheless,
the attention to skin color in the Royal Society allowed racialization to develop
and eventually flourish within the practices of the new science.
Members of the Royal Society were not enthusiastic about evidence provided
by Sloane’s display of skulls, and many opposed any notion of multiple races on
theological grounds. Yet most members supported and many contributed to the
system of global data collection that called attention to issues of skin color and
encouraged naturalists to consider its causes. This system in many ways followed
the movements of British colonialism and trade: the colonial governor in Virginia;
the chaplain for the British Royal African Company’s slave fort, Cape Coast
Castle, in West Africa; the new ambassador to Morocco and the deputy governor
of Tangier were the recipients of sets of queries, and some responded. As the naval
forces of James, the Duke of York, were poised to attack the Dutch in order to take
over their colonies and slave forts in the Second Anglo-Dutch war (1665–7), the
Royal Society developed sets of queries to send out to the locations in question.
28

Thus colonialism and science collaborated to focus attention on skin color, and
the result was an increasing interest in race as inherent difference. I will argue that
the process of investigation itself and not just particular opinions on the subject
26
Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-
Century Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), p. 7. Wheeler does
not analyze studies of skin color in the Royal Society. Anu Korhonen provides useful
commentary on this issue, “we do not need the concept of race to harbour the kinds of
prejudices which race entails,” “Washing the Ethiopian white: conceptualizing black skin in
Renaissance England,” T.F. Earle, K.J.P. Lowe (eds), Black Africans in Renaissance Europe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p.111.
27
I disagree with Ivan Hannaford (Race: The History of an Idea in the West
[Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996] who primarily approaches race as a
matter of intellectual history.
28
James Stuart, Duke of York, later James II, was the brother to Charles II, Admiral of
the Navy, governor of the Royal Adventurers into Africa and the Royal African Company,
and proponent for colonial ventures in North America. He became king in 1685, but deposed
during the “Glorious Revolution” because of his Catholicism.

Studies of Skin Color in the Early Royal Society8
contributed to the development of a consensus in favor of polygenesis during the
nineteenth century.
29

This book includes chapters on Cavendish and Swift not simply because
literature is my first interest, but because both satirists were quite aware of what
has fallen out of sight: the Society’s fascination with skin color and its status as a
credible and favored topic to be taken up by experimental philosophers. In these
chapters I will argue that the genre of the voyage to the moon that influenced both
writers had from the outset turned on its head the polygenesis of the pre-Adamists,
particularly Paracelsus and Bruno, in order to expose European pretensions as
absurd. In the sixteenth century, Paracelsus and Bruno had claimed that Americans
and Ethiopians were inferior because they stemmed from a lesser progenitor than
Adam, and linked them with non-human peoples, like nymphs and satyrs, and,
according to the natural philosophers, giants and pygmies.
30
Francis Godwin and
Cyrano de Bergerac, both precursors of Cavendish and Swift, wrote voyages to
the moon in which Europeans discover that they are an inferior species through
confrontation with superior beings, particularly superior in size.
31
However these
moon giants eventually show signs of the same cultural narcissism that, according
to Godwin and Cyrano, mark the theories of Paracelsus and Bruno. From the
perspective that ethnocentricity is a universal characteristic, Cavendish and Swift
point out the limitations of the Royal Society.
I. Science and Colonialism
Studies of skin color helped to establish the Society as one of the “centres of
calculation,” as Bruno Latour puts it.
32
The Society began to accumulate pages
of information about distant places, which were explicitly intended to create a
29
“Polygenesis” is used in this book to refer to a theory of multiple races among
humans as opposed to “monogenesis,” or the belief in one race. “Polygenism” and
“monogenism” are at times used by historians of race (for instance, Stepan, The Idea of
Race in Science), but I was informed that the word “polygenic” is also used to refer to
the inheritance of genes. Pre-Adamism is a form of polygenesis, but it is based on sacred
history as opposed to the secular theories developing in the later seventeenth century and
established in the nineteenth (see Siep Stuurman, “François Bernier and the Invention
of Racial Classification,” History Workshop Journal 50 [2000]: 1–22, and William
Poole, “Seventeenth-Century Preadamism, and an Anonymous English Preadamist,” The
Seventeenth Century 19/1 [2004]: 14).
30
For more information on pre-Adamism, see section II in the Introduction.
31
Francis Godwin (1562–1633) was the Bishop of Hereford and a historian of the
English church and monarchy. As a student at Oxford, he may have been influenced by
Bruno’s lectures at Oxford, 1583–1585. Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655) was a French
soldier, playwright, student of the natural philosopher Pierre Gassendi, and the author
of science fiction influenced by Francis Godwin. See Chapter 4, section I, for further
discussion.
32
Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through
Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 239.

Introduction 9
natural history of the world, but also effectually built up a knowledge-base to
aid the English in mastering those distant places, either in terms of trade or
colonization. This information included details about latitude and longitude, tides,
weather, and geography. Information about other peoples, including studies of
skin color, became a subset of a discourse of exploration. According to Stuart
Hall, such a discourse “constructs the topic. It defines and produces the objects of
our knowledge. It governs the way that a topic can be meaningfully talked about
and reasoned about.”
33
Given the rather explicit way in which Europeans skewed
the topic of skin color, for instance, by focusing on non-white skin and eventually
using studies of skin color to justify polygenesis, it is significant that the beginnings
of institutionalized empiricism were accompanied by a discourse so clearly used
in the interests of European colonialism. As natural scientists brought information
about non-European people into the home center to be evaluated, empiricism
became the site of a knowledge-authority linked with colonial institutions perhaps
less loosely, but just as certainly as the Orientalism mapped out by Edward Said in
European approaches to the East.
34
Studies of skin color promised to consider population groups, or “nations,”
as the Royal Society put it, in order to understand the relationship between them.
Several questions came to the fore: Is the climate theory accurate in its claim that
the interaction between geography and the four humors determines appearance,
and will people change color if they change location? Is the climate theory false,
with nevertheless everyone “born white,” linked together through a common
origin, and only later “degenerating” into other colors?
35
Or are there ingrained
differences, like blood or skulls, best described as “race,” which establishes
the inherent difference and at times inferiority of other peoples in relationship
to Europeans? These are the articulated questions within the scientific discourse
of skin color in the seventeenth century. However, the process of the discourse
was just as important as the questions themselves. The origin of skin color was a
puzzle for naturalists, but not one that necessarily needed to be solved, since the
point was to create “the Great Divide,” as Latour puts it, to develop hypotheses
and produce controversy that would demonstrate a superiority in knowledge, and
consequently superiority over other populations. Remarkably enough, the issue
remains unsolved even at the present time.
36
33
Stuart Hall (ed.), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices
(Sage Publications, 1997), p. 44.
34
Said considers the relationship between the “academic institutions” associated with
Orientalism and “the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient,” in Orientalism (first
published 1978; New York: Vintage edition, 1979; quoted from rpt. 2003), pp. 2–3.
35
Boyle’s view is considered in Chapter 1, section I.
36
Latour, Science in Action, pp. 211ff, 228ff. On the search for the human skin color
gene, see “Zebrafish Researchers Hook Gene for Human Skin Color,” in Science 370/5755
(December 16, 2005): 1754, 1782–1786. For commentary, see Evelynn Hammonds,
Rebecca M. Herzig (eds), The Nature of Difference: Sciences of Race in the United States
from Jefferson to Genomics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), pp. 309–11.

Studies of Skin Color in the Early Royal Society10
Many who study colonial science find Latour’s account inadequate because
it does not recognize the knowledge that early Western naturalists attributed to
and acquired from indigenous people in Africa, the European colonies, and other
non-European countries; the work of these scholars provides plentiful evidence of
such local knowledge. Some of these scholars also believe that Western prejudice
against indigenous populations was less severe because scientific racism did not
become the majority view until the nineteenth century.
37
There is some evidence
of local knowledge in the material presented here, but I have found very few traces
of it in studies of skin color, which, within the literature of the Royal Society,
was almost exclusively a one-way street: Europeans looking at non-Europeans for
European purposes.
38
I agree that scientific racism was only fully established later;
Chapters 1 through 3 provide evidence that it was historically produced according
to very specific social and economic needs. However, I disagree that early modern
Europeans were significantly free from prejudice.
39
II. Pre-Adamism
Pre-Adamism was a proto-racialized discourse within natural philosophy that is
not as well known to scholars of early modern studies as it is to those who study
early modern science and eighteenth-century culture. Pre-Adamism has come to
figure in all of the following chapters, so it seemed best to introduce it here. Other
early modern explanations for skin color, like the effect of climate, the curse of
Ham, or the power of the maternal imagination, are far better known, have been
addressed thoroughly by others, and their findings are summarized in subsequent
chapters.
40

37
On local knowledge, see Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce,
Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007),
pp. 3, 203–9; and Londa Schiebinger, “Scientific Exchange in the Eighteenth-Century
Atlantic World,” in Bernard Beilyn and Patricia L. Denault (eds), Soundings in Atlantic
History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830 (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 294–328.
38
Boyle does mention that “Navigators tell us of Black Nations, who think so much
otherwise of their own condition, that they paint the Devil White,” and that albinos are
given a privileged position in the Congo: “’all men stand in awe of them,’” Works, vol.
4, pp. 89, 92. According to Yoruba folk wisdom, the original skin of white people has
been burned off and only scar tissue remains (Anthropologist Elizabeth Eames, private
communication).
39
See the conclusion for more commentary on local knowledge and Atlantic Studies.
40
On the climate theory, see Wheeler and Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and
Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). On the
curse of Ham, see Benjamin Braude, “The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic
and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods,” William and Mary
Quarterly 54 (1997): 135–9; David M. Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery
in Early Christianity, Judaism, and Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005),

Introduction 11
Paracelsus speculated that Native Americans were not the descendants of
Adam, “I cannot refrain from making a brief mention of those who have been
found in hidden islands and are still little known. To believe that they have
descended from Adam is difficult to conceive – that Adam’s children have gone
to the hidden islands. But one should well consider, that these people are from a
different Adam. It will be difficult to maintain, that they are related on the basis
of flesh and blood.”
41
For Richard Popkin, Paracelsus’s theories are not strictly
polygenetic, because Paracelsus believed that Indians, like nymphs, giants, and
pygmies, were sub-human and without souls. Nevertheless, Popkin concludes that
these theories “might be called racist.”
42
Paracelsus defined all these groups as
outside the plan of salvation, “Christ died and was born for those who have a soul,
that is who are from Adam, and not for those who are not from Adam, for they are
men but have no soul.”
43

Giordano Bruno believed that Ethiopians and Indians were not descended from
Adam:
Quia multicolores
Sunt hominum species, nec enim generatio nigra
Aethiopum, et qualem producit America fulva,
Udaque Neptuni vivens occulta sub antris,
and Loomba and Burton. On the maternal imagination, see Marie-Hélène Huet, Monstrous
Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Valeria Finucci and Kevin
Brownlee (eds), Generation and Degeneration: Tropes of Reproduction in Literature and
History from Antiquity through Early Modern Europe (Durham: Duke University Press,
2001); Loomba and Burton; and Chapter 5 below.
41
J. S. Slotkin (ed.), Readings in Early Anthropology (Chicago: Aldine Publishing
Company, 1965), p. 42, from Astronomia Magna (1537–1538). Paracelsus (1493–1541)
was a physician and astrologer who opposed Galenic theories of the body, advocated for the
use of chemicals as medicine, and explored alchemy and magic.
42
Richard Popkin was the first to seriously study early modern polygenesis: Isaac
La Peyrère (1596–1676): His Life, Work and Influence (New York: E.J. Brill, 1987); “The
Pre-Adamite Theory in the Renaissance,” in Edward P, Mahoney (ed.), Philosophy and
Humanism: Renaissance Essays in Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1976), pp. 50–69; “The Philosophical Basis of Eighteenth-Century
Racism” in Harold E. Pagliaro (ed.), Racism in the Eighteenth Century (Cleveland: The
Press of Case Western Reserve, 1973), pp. 245–62. On Paracelsus and polygenesis, see
Popkin’s Isaac La Peyrère, p. 34, and “The Philosophical Basis,” p. 251. For Paracelsus’s
non-Adamic men, see A Book on Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies, and Salamanders, and on Other
Spirits in Henry E. Sigerist (ed.), Four Treatises of Theophrastus von Hohenheim called
Paracelsus (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1941), p. 229. See also Paracelsus,
Of the Supreme Mysteries of Nature, R. Turner (trans.) (London, 1655), pp. 51-9. Like
Popkin, Samuel Desmarets associated Paracelsus’s work On Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies with
his views on men before Adam in Refutatio Fabulae Prae-Adamitae (Groningen, 1656), pp.
1–9), one of the most well-known refutations of Isaac La Peyrère.
43
A Book on Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies in Four Treatises, p. 229.

Studies of Skin Color in the Early Royal Society12
Pygmeique iugis ducentes saecula clausis …
atque Austri monstra Gigantes,
Progeniem referunt similem, primique parentis
Unius vires cunctorum progenitrices … .
… Aethiopum
genus ad illum protoplasten nemo sani iudicii referet.
[Of many colors
Are the species of men, and the black race
Of the Ethiopians, and the yellow offspring of America,
And that which lies hidden in the caves of Neptune,
And the Pygmies always shut up in the hills …
and the Gigantic monsters of the South,
Cannot be traced to the same descent, nor are they sprung
From the generative force of a single progenitor … .
… No one of sound judgment will trace the race of the Ethiopians to that first
man.]
44
For Paracelsus and Bruno, giants and pygmies crystallized the possibility of non-
Adamic men.
45
In 1646, Thomas Browne questioned the existence of “the Pygmies
of Paracelsus,” and defined them as “his non-Adamical men, or middle natures
betwixt men and spirits.”
46
Isaac La Peyrère also claimed that there were men
before Adam, but he believed that all groups had souls and were “made up of the
same flesh and bloud.”
47
The Jews were the sacred race fathered by Adam, but
all Europeans as well as Africans and Americans were descended from the pre-
Adamic race. Popkin concludes that La Peyrére’s work is not primarily racist.
48
44
Bruno, De innumerabilibus, immenso et infigurabili (1591), listed as De Immenso
et Innumerabilibus, in Opera Latine Conscripta, Francesco Fiorentino et. al. (eds), (8 vols,
1879-1891), Vol. 1, part 2, pp. 282, 284. I take most of the translation from Slotkin, p. 43;
Thomas Hayward translated the last line, The use of the word “race” is problematic in
both cases: “generatio” can mean “generation” and “gens” can be translated as “nation.”
See Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary, www.perseus.tufts.edu,
accessed July 14, 2012. Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) was a Dominican priest and natural
philosopher who argued not only for the Copernican theory, but also that the universe
was infinite with a plurality of worlds. He visited England between 1583–1585, and was
eventually executed for heretical views by the Roman inquisition.
45
On the interest in giants and pygmies by Bruno and Paracelsus, see Popkin, “Pre-
Adamite Theory,” p. 59, and Isaac La Peyrère, pp. 33–4.
46
Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica,(1646) book IV, chapter 11, p. 207. See also John
Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis (London, 1653). pp. 490-512; particularly p. 492.
47
Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676) was a French theologian and Secretary to the Prince
of Condé. He was forced to recant his views by the Catholic church. On La Peyrère’s view
that all humans “were made up of the same flesh and bloud,” see Popkin, Isaac La Peyrère,
p. 46. La Peyrère uses the phrase in A Theological Systeme upon the Presupposition, that
Men were Before Adam the first part. (London, 1656), p. 59.
48
Popkin, “The Philosophical Basis,” p. 252.

Introduction 13
As “the champion of the pre-Adamites,” La Peyrère challenged Biblical
history. In the 1650s, James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, had announced that
the world was created in 4004 BC, 6,000 years before the present day.
49
However,
La Peyrère compared this view to records of other civilizations like that of the
Chaldeans, Egyptians, Aztecs, Ethiopians, and Chinese, which attributed several
more millennia to human history. Paolo Rossi tells the fascinating story of how
science transformed the past from 6,000 years to a “dark abyss of time,” and La
Peyrère played a crucial role. La Peyrère was no atheist; in fact his purpose was to
make Christianity more acceptable to non-Christians. He concluded that the Bible
was the history only of the Jews, and that God had created all other peoples before
Adam and Eve. This could explain, among other things, how Cain was able to
marry. Like Hobbes and Spinoza, La Peyrère argued that Moses was not the author
of the Pentateuch, but that the beginning of the Bible was written by a variety of
authors who could not be entirely trusted. The flood of Noah occurred to the Jews
alone, according to La Peyrère, since it was impossible to account for the spread
of so many civilizations, including those in the Americas, from the three sons of
Noah—Japhet, Shem, and Ham—traditionally associated only with Europe, Asia,
and Africa.
50
Those who believed that all people were descended from Adam had
to defend the claim that all humans began in one place, and then covered the globe.
Many of the pre-Adamites found this difficult to believe, and speculated that God
created different groups in different parts of the world.
The publication of La Peyrère’s Prae-Adamitae (1655) and the English
translation Men Before Adam (1656) elicited a firestorm of refutations but also
some proponents. Popkin and William Poole identify several people associated
with Robert Boyle and the Royal Society who were interested in La Peyrère’s
theories. Samuel Hartlib mentions La Peyrère in his diary in 1655. Henry
Oldenburg condemns his views in a letter to John Milton in 1656. Some time
later, in 1675, the circle of Robert Hooke discussed “preadamits and of Creation,”
including John Aubrey, Abraham Hill, and Francis Lodwick. Members such as
Lodwick, as well as Edmond Halley, Samuel Pepys, and John Ray, owned a copy
of La Peyrère’s Prae-Adamitae. Lodwick developed his own version of pre-
49
Hugh Trevor-Roper, “The date of Creation” in Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans:
Seventeenth-Century Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 156–61.
See also C.A. Patrides, “Renaissance Estimates of the Year of Creation,” Huntington
Library Quarterly 26/4 (1963), pp. 315-22.
50
La Peyrère, Men before Adam, p. 22; La Peyrère, A Theological Systeme upon the
Presupposition, that Men were Before Adam, pp. 239–58; Popkin, Isaac La Peyrère, pp.
32, 43, 47–52, 69–72. Popkin points out that La Peyrère’s account of Biblical chronology
summed up issues that had been considered at least since A.D. 170 (Isaac La Peyrère, pp.
26–41). Rossi discusses La Peyrère in The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and
the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 132–6. Robert Markley considers the multiple defenses of the
Bible published in the late 1650s and after in Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation
in Newtonian England, 1660–1740 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 34–62.

Studies of Skin Color in the Early Royal Society14
Adamism in the manuscript “A supposal of the manner of Creation,” found in
the papers of Abraham Hill. As Rhodri Lewis has shown, William Petty held to a
monogenetic view, but, in an unpublished work in 1677-8, Petty states: “of man
itself There seems to bee severall species, To say nothing of Gyants & Pigmyes.”
Although Petty was not a pre-Adamist, it is probable that he referred here to
Paracelsus and Bruno, particularly Bruno’s statement,
“
Quia multicolores/ Sunt
hominum species... Pygmeique iugis ducentes saecula clausis/ …/atque Austri
monstra Gigantes,” quoted above.
51
If pre-Adamism is approached as an early version of race theory, grouping
people on a hierarchical scale, and motivated by racism, then this is actually very
strong evidence in favor of the view that race as a concept began simultaneously
with the discovery of the Americas and the beginning of slavery in the European
colonies. Paracelsus broached these ideas in 1537-8, and innate physical
differences were certainly a part of his theory: “It will be difficult to maintain, that
they are related on the basis of flesh and blood.” The impact of pre-Adamism was
strong: the following chapters will show that it lies at the margins of nearly all the
meditations about differences between population groups carried on in the Royal
Society, although it never enters the official record.
However, it seems to me that these ideas should be characterized as proto-racial
rather than an early appearance of the modern idea of race. There was substantial
disagreement among pre-Adamists, since La Peyrere did not accept a difference
in flesh and blood. Any form of pre-Adamism was very much a minority view,
and the established churches were adamantly opposed to these theories, which
they lumped together as a dangerous heresy challenging Biblical chronology.
The emphasis on sacred history in pre-Adamism is significantly different from
the secular theory of race that the Royal Society began to consider at the end
of the seventeenth century.
52
The attention to size as a method of identifying
non-Adamic men, an issue which appeared frequently in the natural philosophy
and literature of this period, and which will be addressed more than once in this
51
Popkin, Isaac La Peyrére, pp. 24, 60, 103–4; Poole, “Seventeenth-Century
Preadamism, and an Anonymous English Preadamist,” pp. 1, 5, 10–12; and “Francis
Lodwick’s Creation: Theology and Natural Philosophy in the Early Royal Society,” Journal
of the History of Ideas 66/2 (2005): 249. Lodwick’s manuscript can be found in BL MS
Sloane 2903,fols. 158
r
-160
v
. His works are published in Francis Lodwick, On Language,
Theology, and Utopia, Felicity Henderson and William Poole (eds.) (Clarendon Press:
Oxford, 2011). On Petty, see The Petty Papers: Some Unpublished Writings of Sir William
Petty, Marquis of Lansdowne (ed.) (2 vols, London: Constable & Co. Ltd., 1927). vol.
2, pp. 19–21, 30–4; and Lewis, William Petty on the Order of Nature: An Unpublished
Manuscript Treatise (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2012), pp.
13, 56, 59-61, 122-3. On giants, Lewis cites several, including Bacon, Bulwer, and Hooke,
but the reference to Bruno seems more relevant (p. 122, note 89). See Lewis on the term
“species,” p. 57.
52
On sacred history as opposed to secular theories of race, see Siep Stuurman,
“François Bernier and the Invention of Racial Classification,” pp. 1-22.

Introduction 15
book, demonstrates that the terms of categorization were very much in flux at
this time. For these reasons, pre-Adamism may have contributed to but could not
on its own have produced the scientific racism of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. This required the racialized slavery that developed in the Americas in
the seventeenth century.
III. Robert Boyle and “the Empire of Man over the inferior Creatures”
Many have investigated the link between Boyle and colonialism, but more attention
is needed to his participation in studies of skin color. I hope to show that Boyle
struggled over the interest in skin color that he helped to create in the Society.
Although he supported slavery throughout his life, he also sought to counter the
Society’s consideration of polygenesis, including pre-Adamism.
In Natural Science and the Origins of the British Empire (2008), Sarah Irving
perceptively explores “Robert Boyle’s Protestant Colonial Project.” According
to Irving, Boyle wrote frequently of “the Empire of Man over the inferior
Creatures” because of his belief that the goal of natural philosophy was to restore
Adam’s original dominion over nature described in Genesis. For Boyle, English
colonists participated in this restoration by making the earth fruitful and by
providing information on the natural world.
53
Irving very effectively illuminates
Boyle’s Biblical notions of empire, his debt to the Hartlib circle, and the nexus
of correspondents in the Americas that the Royal Society cultivated. However,
she does not consider correspondents in Africa, nor Boyle’s questions about skin
color.
54
She concludes that Boyle wholeheartedly embraced the coordination of
science and colonialism. Whereas his approval of slavery supports this view,
Boyle also tried to keep the Society from accepting polygenesis.
It is clear that Boyle was very much involved in the institutions of Charles
II’s fledgling empire: he served on the Council for Foreign Plantations from 1660
to 1664, as a director and investor in the East India Company from 1669, and a
member of and investor in the Hudson’s Bay Company from 1675.
55
Much of his
engagement in plantation settlements must have seemed natural to him, since Boyle
had been born on a Protestant plantation in Ireland and had inherited property in
53
Sarah Irving, Natural Science and the Origins of the British Empire (Pickering
& Chatto, 2008), pp. 69– 92. See Joanna Picciotto on the relationship between natural
philosophy and Adam in Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2010). However, she does not consider directly Boyle’s “empire”
nor its relation to colonialism.
54
Irving quotes both passages in which Boyle considers slavery, but edits out the
references to it (Natural Science, pp. 80-82). Gary Taylor does consider these issues in
Buying Whiteness: Race, Culture, and Identity from Columbus to Hip Hop (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 259-302; I discuss Taylor’s work later in the introduction.
55
Michael Hunter, Boyle: Between God and Science (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2009), pp. 129, 169–71.

Studies of Skin Color in the Early Royal Society16
Ireland from his father, who himself had been a planter and a spokesperson for
Protestant imperial aims in Ireland from 1602 to 1643.
56
Boyle’s papers include
a document celebrating the emerging empire, and arguing for the formation of a
Council for Trade: “it is the Empire of England likewise that is hereby rendered
the more August formidable and Considerable abroad … That it being noo more a
secret of State now[,] that he that hath the greatest force by Sea (howe little soever
his own dominions be) hath the greatest oppurtunity to give Law to the rest of the
world.” Although it is unlikely that Boyle was the author of this document, the
presence of it in his papers suggests that he took a significant interest in English
colonies abroad.
57

However, he was more than once at pains to insist that his first interest was
either acquiring the knowledge needed for Bacon’s “Natural and Experimental
History,” or bringing Christianity to non-Christians. In a memoir dictated late in
his life to Bishop Gilbert Burnet, Boyle claimed that his main purpose on the
Council for Foreign Plantations and the East India Company was “to know the
Natural History of those Countries.” In an essay “Containing Various Observations
about Diamonds,” he clarified that “the desire of Knowledge, not Profit, drew
me” to be a director of the East India Company.
58
Indeed the colonial position he
seems to have been most committed to was Governorship of “the Company for
the propagation of the Gospel in New England and the parts adjacent in America”
from 1662 to 1689. During his term with the East India Company, he also worked
56
J.R. Jacob, Robert Boyle and the English Revolution (New York: Burt Franklin,
1977), pp. 144–9; ODNB . Nicholas Canny, The Upstart Earl: A Study of the Social and
Mental World of Richard Boyle, first Earl of Cork, 1566–1643 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1982), pp. 6–8; 128ff.
57
Royal Society Library, Boyle Papers 39: fols 208v, 210v (hereafter BP). Thomas
Povey or Martin Noell are more likely to be the authors of this document than Boyle, since
they were directly involved in the formation of both the councils for trade and for foreign
plantations. It could be a version of their “Overtures” or “Propositions,” since these were
used as the basis for the “Instructions” for the Council for Foreign Plantations (Charles
Andrews, British Committees, Commissions, and Councils of Trade and Plantations, 1622–
1675 [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1908], pp. 68–76). The language of the document
was also used in August 1660 in Parliamentary arguments in favor of the Navigation Act,
which protected English colonial interests. The speaker said the Act “will enable your
Majesty to give the law to foreign princes” and “to enlarge your Majesty’s dominions all
over the world,” quoted in D.G. Shomette and R.D. Haslach, Raid on America: The Dutch
Naval Campaign of 1672–1674 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988), p.
14. This language supports Nicholas Canny’s claim that “by the end of the seventeenth
century, a new concept of Empire had been established,” in which the English realized that
“colonies were essential to the economic well-being of the community” in Nicholas Canny
(ed.) The Origins of the Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth
Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 22.
58
“The Burnet Memorandum,” printed in Michael Hunter (ed.), Robert Boyle by
Himself and His Friends (London: William Pickering, 1994), p. 27; Hunter, Boyle: Between
God and Science, pp. 169–71; Boyle, Works, vol. 11, p. 385.

Introduction 17
diligently to translate the Bible into Malay and to increase the Company’s
engagement in bringing Christianity to East Indians.
59
Boyle wanted to believe
that the new science, like the spread of Christianity, could be distinguished from
the greed and violence associated with the developing English empire.
His writing on “the Empire of Man over the inferior creatures” reveals his
own moral concern about a complicity between natural philosophy and colonial
conquest. In the first part of Some Considerations touching the Usefulnesse of
Experimental Natural Philosophy, published in 1663, but written as early as
1650, Boyle consistently uses variations on the phrase “this Empire of Man, as
a Naturalist, over the Creatures” to authorize natural philosophy in terms of the
Bible, but also to clarify the difference between the worldly empire of monarchs
and the more virtuous empire of the philosopher.
60
The phrase is based on God’s
commands to Adam and Eve in Genesis 1:26 and 28–30, “multiply, and replenish
the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the
fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth,” as well
as on Bacon’s call for “the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the
effecting of all things possible” in The New Atlantis.
61
Boyle explains that “the
rest of the Creatures were made for Man, since he alone of the Visible World
is able to enjoy, use, and relish many of the other Creatures … So Man alone
among Animals is endow’d with Reason.” Therefore, “the Study of Philosophy is
not only Delightful, as it teaches us to Know Nature, but also as it teaches us in
many cases to Master and Command her … ”. Boyle imagines Adam surveying
in wonder the “new world” of creations produced by chemists and others of his
“Posterity.” The passage proceeds to consider gunpowder like that used by Cortez
in his defeat of Montezuma and the Aztecs:
… he [the naturalist] is able to perform such things as do not only give him
a Power to Master Creatures otherwise much stronger than himselfe; but may
ennable one man to do such wonders, as another man shall think he cannot
sufficiently admire. As the poor Indians lookt upon the Spaniards as more than
men, because the knowledge they had of the properties of Nitre, Sulphur, and
Charcoale, duely mixt, ennabled them to Thunder and Lighten so fatally, when
they pleased. And this Empire of Man, as a Naturalist, over the Creatures, may
perchance be to a Philosophical soul preserved by reason untainted with Vulgar
Opinions, of a much more satisfactory kind of Power or Soveraignty then that
for which ambitious Mortals are wont so bloodily to contend. For oftentimes
this Latter, being commonly but the Gift of Nature or Present of Fortune, and
but too often the Acquist of [or what is acquired through] Crimes, does no more
argue any true worth or noble superiority in the possessor of it, then it argues
one Brasse counter to be of a better Mettal then its Fellowes … Whereas the
59
Hunter, Boyle: Between God and Science, pp. 195–7.
60
Boyle, Works, vol. 3, pp. xix; 211–12, 216, 218, 291, 295.
61
Francis Bacon, The Major Works, Brian Vickers (ed.), (Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 2002), p. 480; Irving, pp. 23–46.

Studies of Skin Color in the Early Royal Society18
Dominion that Physiologie gives the Prosperous Studier of it (besides that it is
wont to be innocently acquired, by being the Effect of his Knowledg) is a Power
that becomes Man as Man. And to an ingenious spirit, the Wonders he performes
bring perchance a higher satisfaction, as they are Proofes of his Knowledg, then
as they are Productions of his Power, or even bring Accessions to his Store.
62
By using the word “Empire” so prominently, Boyle seems excited to develop
the Baconian analogy between European colonial exploration overseas and a
“new world” of chemical inventions.

But Boyle’s delight in developing this
analogy becomes clouded when he feels compelled to represent the Spanish use
of gunpowder to conquer the Indians as simultaneously remarkable and morally
reprehensible. The phrase “so fatally” brings together the less dangerous appearance
of godlike control over thunder with the violence of colonial murder. The status of
the Indians is problematic in the passage quoted above: Boyle’s religion requires
that the Indians be descendants of Adam, but his analogy of the “Empire of Man”
conquering a “new world” locates the Indians as “Creatures” mastered by Adam’s
“Posterity.” As if sensing this problem, Boyle proceeds to develop a contrast
between scientific and territorial conquest: the “Philosophical Soul” enjoys a kind
of “Power and Soveraignty” as well as “true worth or noble superiority” that is
more “satisfactory” than the imperial accomplishments of “ambitious Mortals”
who are either graced with power through inheritance (“the Gift of nature”),
or stained by blood and the “Acquist of [or what is acquired through] Crimes.”
Although he declares that knowledge is an innocent power that “becomes Man as
Man,” Boyle then moves to distance himself even from this power: the wonders
the naturalist is capable of are satisfying “as they are Proofes of his Knowledg,”
rather than of his power or wealth.
63
Part of what seems to be driving Boyle in this
passage is an uncomfortable awareness that, despite his assertion of the superiority
of knowledge over power, his own example of gunpowder unites the two. The
link between natural philosophy and political empire becomes both analogical
62
Boyle, Works, vol. 3, p. 212. See pp. xix–xxiv for dating. Acosta’s discussion
of Cortez and Montezuma probably lies behind Boyle’s passage, since two phrases are
repeated in both: “poor Indians” and “more than men” (The Naturall and Morall Historie
of the East and West Indies [1604], pp. 570–4). But in Acosta’s account, the Indians
believe the Spaniards to be gods before any guns are fired, and the effect of the Spanish
brandishing their weapons is that the Indians come to believe that the Spaniards may be
godlike but nevertheless their enemies. If this passage does influence Boyle, then he greatly
exaggerates the admiration of the Indians for gunpowder. Laura Stevens considers the “knot
of ambivalent benevolence” in European attitudes of pity in The Poor Indians: British
Missionaries, Native Americans, and Colonial Sensibility (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2004, p. 4 and throughout.
63
See Lawrence M. Principe on Boyle’s “complex sentence structure, wealth of
circumstantial detail, and overly qualified prose,” The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and
His Alchemical Quest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 107; and “Virtuous
Romance and Romantic Virtuoso: The Shaping of Robert Boyle’s Literary Style,” Journal
of the History of Ideas 56 (1995): 377–97.

Introduction 19
and disturbingly literal, as it is elsewhere in Usefulnesse.
64
This suggests that
the possibility of simultaneous scientific and colonial triumphs offered by the
Restoration was both welcome and unnerving to Boyle.
65
Henry Oldenburg, the Secretary of the Royal Society, and Boyle’s sister Lady
Ranelagh were disturbed by the same issues.
66
Comments in their letters to Boyle
suggest that the problems posed by empire were a regular topic of conversation
among them. These comments distinguish between the nobility of scientific goals
and the corruption of economic and political imperialism. In December 1660,
Oldenburg notes with interest the links between the founding of the Royal Society
and the Council for Foreign Plantations, but, for him, the Council attends primarily
to religious issues: “the civil and spiritual welfare of the English colonists” and
the “means by which the Gospel of Christ may be introduced to pagan and
barbarous foreigners.”
67
As the English continued to pursue their colonial interests
in the Second Anglo-Dutch war in 1666, a war which included terrible losses but
brought to England the slave fort Cape Coast Castle as well as the colony of New
York, Oldenburg affirmed in a letter to Boyle, “Let Princes a nd States make warre
and shed bloud; let us cultivate vertue and Philosophy, and study to doe good to
Mankind.”
68
Lady Ranelagh was particularly worried:
Wheather the Domminion you are recommending to men [that is, “the Empire
of Man, as a Naturalist, over the Creatures” described in Usefulnesse] wil take
soe much with them to rayse their Ambitions towards its attainment as that they
most commonly persue with much more paines: I know not & much doubt the
worst. but Certainely its most likely the best way of Mans ruleing the Creatures
is by his Imploying those faculties to that purpose which god himselfe had fitted
In their Imployment to make him able to doe, so, & those are his rational ones
64
Boyle, Works, vol. 3, pp. 296; 359, see in conjunction with vol. 6, pp. 424–5.
65
On Boyle’s conscience, see Michael Hunter, Robert Boyle (1627–1691):
Scrupulosity and Science (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2000).
66
See note 14 on Oldenburg. Katherine Jones, Viscountess Ranelagh, participated in
the Hartlib Circle, which sought scientific and economic reform in Ireland and elsewhere,
and she eventually provided a London home and a laboratory for her brother Robert.
Oldenburg was tutor to her son, and she introduced Oldenburg to Boyle. See Lynette
Hunter, “Sisters of the Royal Society: The Circle of Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh,”
in Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton, Women, Science and Medicine 1500–1700 (Phoenix
Mill: Sutton, 1997), pp. 178–97.
67
Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg (eds), A. Rupert Hall, Marie Boas Hall (9 vols,
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965–1973), Oldenburg to Boreel, December 13,
1660, vol. 1, p. 406.
68
Correspondence of Robert Boyle: 1636–1691 (eds), Michael Hunter, Antonio
Clericuzio and Lawrence M Principe (6 vols, London: Chatto and Pickering, 2001),
Oldenburg to Boyle, March 24, 1666 (vol. 2, p. 126–7). It is worth noting, however, that
Oldenburg keeps Boyle fully informed of the events of the Anglo-Dutch wars, with their
potentially crucial effect on the slave trade (Boyle, Correspondence , Oldenburg to Boyle,
vol. 2, pp. 298, 337, 361, 491, 515, 516).

Studies of Skin Color in the Early Royal Society20
whereby as he may discover the properties & uses of other things soe he may
chuse to aply them thereby to their proper ends, the service & Instruction of
mankind, but swords & gunns are taken upon the work [of the great] destroyer
to be more suteable meanes to that end & used, accordingly, though we dayly
see that by that way of overcomeing we spoyle what we should governe …
69
Lady Ranelagh praises the empire over the creatures promised by natural
philosophy, but she seems quite skeptical that this program will decrease in any
way the use of “swords & gunns” or the violent effects of the English empire: “we
dayly see that by that way of overcomeing we spoyle what we should governe …
.” She appears to be contrasting with a great deal of irony the devil’s method of
dominion, imperial conquest through bloodshed, and that given by God to man
in Genesis, best pursued through man’s rational faculties “whereby as he may
discover the properties & uses of other things soe he may chuse to aply them
thereby to their proper ends, the service & Instruction of mankind.” She uses the
generic term “man” throughout the passage, and therefore never directly disputes
the masculine emphasis in Boyle’s phrase, “this Empire of Man.” However, she
also suggests that men seem unable to rise to Boyle’s philosophical challenge and
will only produce an empire that is characterized by greed and aggression.
By the mid-1660s, Boyle, Oldenburg, and Lady Ranelagh did not share in the
happy expectation of a combined economic, political, and religious domination by
England over the colonies and eventually the world. Both Oldenburg and Ranelagh
name what they see as the purpose of natural philosophy: “the service & Instruction
of mankind,” or studying “to doe good to Mankind.” I hope to demonstrate that,
even though Boyle lay the ground work for the Society’s attention to skin color
through his chapter on the subject in Experiments and Considerations touching
Colours (1664) and his “General Heads for a Natural History of a Country”
(1666), he became disturbed by the direction these studies were taking within
the Society. Therefore, he tried to keep polygenesis out of discussions within the
Society, and he supported Morgan Godwyn’s efforts to open the Anglican church
to Africans and Indians in the colonies in the 1680s.
70
However, the limits on this moral aversion to colonial conquest for Boyle
become clear in his comments on slavery, which he supported throughout his
69
Boyle, Correspondence , Lady Ranelagh to Boyle, August 6, 1665, vol. 2, pp. 503–
4. This was six months after the declaration of the Second Anglo-Dutch war on March 4,
1665. John Beale writes to Boyle on May 27, 1665, “I have been ofttimes sollicitous, Howe
I might tender to you one line that might be serviceable to your deare Engagement for the
Empire of Mankind” (Boyle, Correspondence, vol. 2, p. 466).
70
On Boyle’s reaction against polygenesis and his work with Godwyn, see Chapter
Three. See also Ruth Paley, Cristina Malcolmson, Michael Hunter, “Parliament and
Slavery, 1660-c.1710,” Slavery and Abolition 31/2 (2010): pp. 257-81. The grandson of
Francis Godwin, Morgan Godwyn (c. 1640-c.1685-1709) was an Anglican minister in
Virginia, Barbados, and England. He published works that protested against the brutality
of slave-owners, and urged that enslaved peoples be allowed to convert to Christianity.

Introduction 21
life.
71
Here again the empire of natural philosophy and that of English colonialism
coalesce. In manuscript versions of aphorisms written in 1689–90 for the Christian
Virtuoso, The Second Part, Boyle argues that the use of tobacco and sugar in the
colonial system are evidence of the dominion God has granted man, “so many
and so various creatures as we have mentioned, to be directly subjected by God to
man’s dominion, may be of great advantage to him, and of more than they have
been, when once they shall be improved by sagacious and industrious virtuosi”
since “great benefits accrue not only to single persons, but to whole communities,
and sometimes even to nations.” One of the “great benefits,” according to Boyle, is
slavery: “therefore two plants, whereof one is a reed [sugar-cane], and the other a
weed [tobacco] … have been made to be so serviceable to man, by what they afford
him, and by the various employments they give to some hundreds of thousands
of indigent persons to cultivate, manufacture, and transport them.”
72
It is not at all
clear that the term “man” in “man’s dominion” includes the “indigent [deficient
or poor] persons” laboring to produce the bounty necessary for this empire. Again
Boyle’s formulation about “man’s dominion” conflates as “creatures directly
subjected by God” plants, animals, and colonized and enslaved peoples. Boyle
elides the process of abduction necessary for slavery, and the previous family
or economic history of those enslaved, and simply defines Africans and Indians
working the plantations as “indigent.” Boyle had stated something very similar
in the 1671 publication of the second part of Usefulness, celebrating “how many
Hands, the Introduction of one Physico-Mechanical Art may set on work” in the
sugar-works of Barbados.
73
It is significant that, even after reading Godwyn’s
devastating critique of the brutality of slavery in Barbados and Virginia written in
the 1680s, Boyle remained convinced in 1691 that the manufacture of sugar and
tobacco was proof of the “Empire of Man” given by God, and that slavery was a
communal good.
74
***
When I first began this book, in which I intended to consider Cavendish’s response
to Boyle, I expected to find multiple commentaries on studies of skin color in
the early Society. However, very few were available. J.R. Jacob did argue that
Boyle pursued the interrelated goals of science, trade, and empire, but skin color
was never Jacob’s subject.
75
One reason for the lack of attention to this area is
that the archival work necessary for such an analysis is still being done. It is not
71
Gary Taylor discusses Boyle’s views on slavery written in 1671, but not his
consideration of slavery as part of the “Empire of Man” in 1691 (Buying Whiteness, p. 278).
72
Boyle, Works, vol. 12, pp. lxiv, 444–5.
73
Boyle, Works, vol. 6, pp. 424–5.
74
On Godwyn and Boyle, see Chapter 3, section III.
75
J.R. Jacob, Robert Boyle and the English Revolution (New York: Burt Franklin,
1977), pp. 133–59.

Studies of Skin Color in the Early Royal Society22
an exaggeration to say that the catalogues of Boyle’s manuscripts as well as the
publication of Boyle’s works, diaries, and correspondence by Michael Hunter and
his co-editors, including Antonio Clericuzio, Edward B. Davis, James P. Hoy,
Paul Kesaris, Charles Littleton, and Lawrence M. Principe, have made this book
possible.
76
However, the general hagiographic approach of much of this work has
interfered with considering the Society’s interest in skin color. Also, historians
of science could move beyond the popular genre of editing and publishing an
unpublished document, however useful the analysis, since this genre makes it
more difficult to place the work in the context of colonialism and the history of
slavery.
77

I thought perhaps I would find commentary on the issue in current science
studies: the groundbreaking work of Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer in Leviathan
and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (1985) and other
publications provided a crucial analysis of the culture of the Society, particularly
the role of “matters of fact,” but few of these studies thus far have addressed
studies of skin color.
78
The new work on science and empire in Atlantic Studies
is fascinating, but primarily focused on the colonies.
79
Mark Govier’s article on
76
Hunter, Hoy, Kesaris (eds), The Letters and Papers of Robert Boyle (Bethesda,
MD: University Publications of America, 1992); Hunter and Davis (eds), Works of Robert
Boyle (1999); Hunter, Clericuzio and Principe (eds), Correspondence of Robert Boyle
(2001); Hunter (ed.), The Boyle Papers: Understanding the Manuscripts of Robert Boyle
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Hunter, Littleton (eds), The Robert Boyle Work Diaries, http://
www.bbk.ac.uk/Boyle/workdiaries/, accessed August 18, 2011; Hunter, Boyle: Between
God and Science (2009).
77
Rhodri Lewis and William Poole have made available crucial works that bear on the
history of race. Poole rarely comments on this history, but see Lewis, William Petty on the
Order of Nature, pp. 54-71; and “William Petty’s Anthropology: Religion, Colonialism, and
the Problem of Human Diversity,” Huntington Library Quarterly 74/2 (2011), pp. 261-288.
78
Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle,
and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). But see Schaffer,
“Golden Means: Assay Instruments and the Geography of Precision in the Guinea Trade,”
in Christian Licoppe, Heniz Otto Sibum and Marie-Noelle Bourguet (eds), Instruments,
Travel and Science: Itineraries of Precision from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century
(New York: 2002), pp. 20–50. Those who do consider skin color include James Delbourgo,
in “Slavery in the Cabinet of Curiosities: Hans Sloane’s Atlantic World,” http://www.
britishmuseum.org/pdf/delbourgo%20essay.pdf (2007), accessed August 18, 2011, and his
current project Empire in the Cabinet of Curiosities; and Valentin Groebner, “Complexio/
Complexion: Categorizing Individual Natures, 1250–1600” in Lorraine Daston, Fernando
Vidal (eds), The Moral Authority of Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004),
pp. 361–83. Also fundamental to Boyle studies is Shapin’s A Social History of Truth:
Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994), and Never Pure (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2010).
79
Joyce E. Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-
American Frontier, 1500–1676 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); and Sarah
Rivett, The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England (Chapel Hill: University of

Introduction 23
“The Royal Society, Slavery and the Island of Jamaica: 1660–1700” (1999) does
consider these issues quite remarkably. Govier discovered that the Royal Society
invested in the slave-trading Royal African Company from 1682 to 1696, and he
found some of the most important discussions in the Society on skin color and
race. Govier defined his purpose as reorienting the “more academic institutional
approach” to the Society to an “integral approach,” in which the Society is
considered “as an entity which was part of a nascent British imperial complex.”
80

I hope this work will contribute to his; however his article does not include all the
relevant discussions, an analysis of them in terms of the various theories about
skin color current at the time, nor an account of how the Society’s views changed
over time.
81
I have also added to his work a wider consideration of the sets of
queries sent out by the Royal Society, a more precise focus on the questions about
skin color in the queries, and evidence of an interest in race-difference by Hans
Sloane and Abraham Hill. Gary Taylor’s chapters on science in Buying Whiteness
(2005) are indispensable, especially in his account of the interconnections between
the Royal Society and the Council for Foreign Plantations. However, his focus at
times on the great men of the period, particularly Boyle and Locke, prevented
him from considering discussions at the meetings of the Society or Oldenburg’s
network of contacts.
82
Histories and analyses of race, especially as they bear on
gender, in the early modern period as well as the eighteenth century have been
invaluable to me as well, but the Royal Society has been only briefly considered
North Carolina Press, 2011) do address race very intriguingly, but their work is focused on
American Indians. Other compelling works are James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew (eds),
Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (New York: Routledge, 2007); and Susan Scott
Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic
World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). There is also excellent
work on eighteenth-century science and colonialism, including Londa Schiebinger, Plants
and Empire: Colonial Biospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2004); and Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation
(London: Routledge, 1992).
80
Mark Govier, “The Royal Society, Slavery and the Island of Jamaica: 1660-
1700,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 53/2 (1999): pp. 204, 206-7.
Andrew S. Curran’s admirable The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age
of Enlightenment (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), which addresses
the interconnections between natural history and slavery in the French enlightenment,
unfortunately came to my attention only during the final stages of publishing this book.
This is also the case for the fascinating articles in Judy A. Hayden, Travel Narratives, the
New Science, and Literary Discourse, 1569-1750 (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2012).
81
Crucial for addressing the implications of Govier’s article is Richard Waller’s
“General Index to the Journals (Being to the Ninth), Registers (Being to the End of the
Sixth), and Letter-Books (Being to the End of the Eleventh) of the Royal Society. (To
1695),” 2 vols, Royal Society Library, RBO/22 and RBO/23.
82
Taylor, pp. 259–302.

Studies of Skin Color in the Early Royal Society24
in those works.
83
Many have been particularly illuminating, for example, Mary
Floyd-Wilson’s English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama. She argues
that, although blackness had previously been considered one of the familiar
skin colors produced by the environment in the climate theory, Thomas Browne
and Robert Boyle turned blackness into a “scientific mystery.”
84
My purpose in
this book has been to take up the story from there, and to demonstrate what the
members of the Royal Society made of this mystery.
The first three chapters of the book focus on studies of skin color. In Chapter 1,
I argue that Boyle’s chapter and the colonial expansion of England cooperated to
turn skin color, which was already a concern for travelers, into the opportunity for
philosophical meditation according to the principles of the experimental method.
The chapter considers the first set of questions about inhabitants in a foreign
country sent out by the Society, and the Society’s museum and its specimen of the
83
Peter Erickson and Clark Hulse (eds), Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation,
Race and Empire in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press,
2000); Erickson, “Representations of Blacks and Blackness in the Renaissance”; Margaret
W. Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity
and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003);
Catherine Gallagher with Simon Stern (eds), Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave (Boston:
Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000), pp. 3–33, 208–472; Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets”
in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), Learning to Curse (New York: Routledge,
1990), and Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1991); Hall, Things of Darkness; Ivo Kamps and Jyotsna G. Singh (eds), Travel
Knowledge: European “Discoveries” in the Early Modern Period (New York: Palgrave,
2001); Ania Loomba, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002); Loomba, Burton (eds), Race in Early Modern England; Hendricks, Parker
(eds), Women, “Race,” and Writing; Suyata Iyengar, Shades of Difference: Mythologies
of Skin Color in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2005); Joyce Green MacDonald, Women and Race in Early Modern Texts (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), and ed., Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Renaissance
(Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, 1997); Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring
Women: Gender and Reproduction in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Wheeler, The Complexion of Race. For valuable discussions on
whether or not the terms “race” and “racism” can be applied to the early modern period,
see Lara Bovilsky, Barbarous Play: Race on the English Renaissance Stage (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2008), pp. 1–35; and Ian Smith, Race and Rhetoric in the
Renaissance: Barbarian Errors (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 1–12.
84
Floyd-Wilson, p. 79. Some argue that black skin was treated as a marvel from
the time of classical antiquity (Lloyd Thompson, Romans and Blacks [Norman, Okla.:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1989]; Eliav-Feldon, Isaac, Ziegler [eds], The Origin of
Racism in the West). However, this does not change the significance of Floyd-Wilson’s
point that the Royal Society approached black skin rather than white as needing scientific
explanation.

Introduction 25
“entire SKIN of a MOOR.” I also examine the role of questions about skin color
in Boyle’s “General Heads” as well as the widespread and various sets of queries
developed by Oldenburg, which resulted in a number of responses. Chapter
2 outlines the debates in the Society between those who supported the climate
theory and an important minority who began to argue for a secular version of
polygenesis based on physical differences. I contend that the engagement of many
of the members in colonial institutions and the slave trade determined that this
discussion would focus on black Africans rather than the originally quite varied
group of peoples and countries in Oldenburg’s network. Chapter 3 considers
Boyle’s reaction against pre-Adamism as well as his resistance to the growing
interest in polygenesis towards the end of the century. I speculate that his resistance
may have been caused by a recognition that his own work—the chapter on skin
color and the “General Heads”—had contributed to this growing interest. A letter
to Boyle by John Clayton, a minister and naturalist in Virginia, demonstrates
that Clayton argued extensively that the Indians were a different race, inferior
to white Europeans. Other material in the Society provides evidence that Boyle
and Nehemiah Grew worked to ensure that this testimony would never reach the
members of the Society or the wider public. This chapter also considers Boyle’s
engagement with Morgan Godwyn, who worked mightily against polygenesis as
well as brutality in the slave-holding colonies. Boyle may have taken up Godwyn’s
goal of legislation requiring slave-owners to provide Africans and Indians access
to baptism and membership in the Anglican church. I also consider the ironies of
this goal, as well as of Biblical monogenesis itself, since all of the draft bills for
Parliament reassure slave-owners that they will not lose their property.
Following the account of the Society’s interest in skin color in Chapters 1
through 3, I consider race and gender together in an analysis of the Society, the
Philosophical Transactions, and the satires about it. In Chapter 4, I argue that,
in The Blazing World (1666), Cavendish satirizes Boyle’s claim to master nature
through “the Empire of Man, as a Naturalist, over the Creatures.” Cavendish
objects to the exclusivity of the term “Man,” and suggests that all humans should
be considered as “Creatures.” Her Empress in The Blazing World represents
the control that Cavendish believes nature holds over all living beings, a theory
presented in full in her companion work, Observations upon Experimental
Philosophy (1666). Her fictional world is developed in the context of the genre
of the voyage to the moon, especially as practiced by Godwin and Cyrano, who
satirize the ethnocentricity of European natural philosophers.
85
Cavendish uses
polygenesis in The Blazing World not to criticize it as a form of European cultural
narcissism, as do Godwin and Cyrano, but to demonstrate, first, that animals have
their own form of knowledge and power, despite Boyle’s claim to mastery, and,
second, to attribute to non-Europeans and all women a creativity and scientific
ability unrecognized by the Royal Society. Cavendish juxtaposes the technical
ability of indigenous people to some widely known failures of the Society to aid
85
On Godwin and Cyrano, see note 32,

Studies of Skin Color in the Early Royal Society26
England during the Second Anglo-Dutch war. The conflagration at the end of The
Blazing World, in which the Empress devastates her enemies, represents, as others
have argued, Cavendish’s dream of British triumph in the war against the Dutch.
The chapter provides evidence that the Cavendish family was very much engaged
in this conflict. Since it was a colonial war, with plantations and slave forts at
stake, it cannot be said that Cavendish opposed the development of an English
empire or the slave trade; she simply thought a different kind of science would
more effectively aid the king. I also consider Cavendish’s position on polygenesis
and monogenesis, and suggest that, although her opinions remain rather vague,
she affirms that humans are “one kind” in Observations.
Chapter 5 assesses the significance of the longstanding view that the mother’s
imagination could change the color of her child, evident in Boyle’s chapter,
discussions at meetings, and the Philosophical Transactions. These sources
demonstrate that the belief in the power of the imagination and of maculae
maternae, or maternal stains, remained persuasive to most members of the
Society at least until the middle of the eighteenth century, but probably longer. In
addition, I argue that the Society’s interest in polygenesis was sustained through
its tendency to attribute only to European women a vulnerability to the power of
the imagination whereas non-European women were associated with physicality
and promiscuity. Thus the thought and sexuality of white women were defined as
in need of policing, whereas non-white women were associated with an alleged
promiscuity that served the colonial interests of slave-owners and European
travelers. This argument depends on Jennifer L. Morgan’s thesis that travel
narratives provided a justification for the hard labor of slavery by distinguishing
between a birth process that was defined as painless for women in Africa, and
associated with pain for women who were “members of a Christian community …
the connection between African women’s reproductive lives and their suitability
for hard manual labor would link their status with their bodies in a way distinct
from but related to the biology of race.”
86
Through its queries to foreign countries,
the Royal Society sustained this distinction first by testing but finally proliferating
the view that the birth process was painless for African and Indian women, but
also by restricting the power of the imagination to white women.
Chapter 6 makes the claim that, in Gulliver’s Travels, Swift calls attention to
the Society’s process of evaluating skin color through Gulliver’s anxious attempt
and eventual failure to distinguish himself from the Yahoos by noting their
complexion. Swift characterizes the Society’s interest in the subject as motivated
in large part by the desire of the English to assert their superiority over those they
describe. Through Gulliver’s encounters with pygmies and giants in his travels, as
well as the Yahoos, Swift targets emerging accounts of race-difference, accepted
by only a small minority of Europeans, but also the high-minded monogenesis
professed by some in the Society. In the process of considering this issue,
Swift deflates the difference between the delicacy of the European lady and the
86
Morgan, pp. 36–40.

Introduction 27
sensuality of non-European women determining accounts of reproduction in the
Philosophical Transactions. Swift’s work also makes visible a transitional period
in which travel narratives written in response to the Royal Society began to be
accompanied by longer and more complex considerations of color, a scientific
discourse that contributed to the development of modern scientific racism in the
nineteenth century.
In the Conclusion, I argue against the claim in Atlantic Studies that all studies
of science and empire should focus on the interchanges and conflicts between
local and European knowledge. Although the purposes and work of this field are
admirable and inspiring, attention to “centres of calculation,” as Latour puts it, are
still needed to trace out the role of European knowledge and power structures in
the emergence of scientific racism.
Finally, the Appendix presents the argument that Swift knew and was influenced
by Cavendish’s satire of the Society in The Blazing World and Observations upon
Experimental Philosophy. Biographical evidence demonstrates that it is quite
likely that he read her works. I analyze the literary evidence of influence that
goes beyond that of the multiple shared sources. Cavendish developed some key
aspects of the critique of the Royal Society long before Swift, and this critique
contributed a great deal to his work. A revision is required of the lists of imaginary
voyages from the period by Percy Adams, Philip Gove, and Marjorie Nicolson
which do not include The Blazing World.
87
Swift may have played a part in
obscuring Cavendish’s introduction of a female voice into the largely all-male
world of natural philosophy and Lucianic satire.
87
Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (Lexington, Ky.: University
Press of Kentucky, 1983); Gove, The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1975); Nicolson, Voyages to the Moon (New York: Macmillan,
1948).

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Chapter 1
Race and the Experimental Method
in the Society
When Leonardo Magalotti toured the museum of the Royal Society on April 25,
1669, he found a few objects to be of special note:
Amongst these curiosities, the most remarkable are an ostrich, whose young
were always born alike; an herb which grew in the stomach of a thrush; and
the skin of a moor, tanned, with the beard and hair white; but more worthy of
observation than all the rest, is a clock, whose movements are derived from
the vicinity of a loadstone, and it is so adjusted as to discover the distance of
countries, at sea, by the longitude.
1
Unlike most modern commentators on the museum, Magalotti actually points out
the presence of “the skin of a moor,” but he shares with contemporary critics a
preference for less disconcerting specimens. For him, like many scholars of the
scientific revolution, it is the clock that best sums up the Royal Society’s new
attitude toward nature as mechanical, as well as the prospective benefits that could
result from this approach.
2
However, I will argue in this chapter that questions
about skin color directly contributed to the development of the experimental
method during this period, and that naturalists honed their skills at the method
by considering the topic. The Royal Society sent out questions about skin
color in response to new colonies and trade-routes, and English travelers used
the experimental method to mediate their relationships with other peoples. The
1
Leonardo Magalotti, Travels of Cosmo III, Grand Duke of Tuscany, through
England During the Reign of Charles II (1669) [London, 1821], pp. 188–9. R.E.W.
Maddison describes Magalotti’s visit to Boyle and the Royal Society in “Studies in the Life
of Robert Boyle, F.R.S. Part I. Robert Boyle and Some of His Foreign Visitors,” Notes and
Records of the Royal Society 9/1 (1951): 22–5.
2
Laurens Laudan, “The Clock Metaphor and Probabilism: the Impact of Descartes
on English Methodological Thought 1650–65,” Annals of Science 22 (1966): 73–104.
Robert Boyle uses the clock as an image for a mechanized nature in A Free Enquiry into
the Vulgarly Receiv’d Notion of Nature Made in an Essay Address’d to a Friend (1686),
Works, vol. 10, p. 448. A “weather-clock” is described in Nehemiah Grew’s account of the
Society’s Museum, Musaeum Regalis Societatis: Or, A Catalogue and Description of the
Natural and Artificial Rarities Belonging to the Royal Society and preserved at Gresham
Colledge (London: Thomas Malthus, 1686), pp. 357–8. However, Magalotti may have seen
in the museum one of the pendulum clocks tested by the Society on a voyage to Africa (Lisa
Jardine, Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory [London: Harper Press,
2008], pp. 282–90).

Studies of Skin Color in the Early Royal Society30
method allowed Western witnesses to fix any instability of power into a contrast
between an “impartial,” “indifferent” observer, and those observed, often known
solely in terms of a physical body.
As Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park define it, the “collective empiricism” of
the Royal Society did not include modern notions of objectivity, the disappearance
of the observer, or a view from nowhere, which developed into the norm associated
with machine-produced results in the mid-nineteenth century. Rather the empiricism
of the early Royal Society required impartiality towards traditional explanations
and authorities, and was built around special cases, wonders, marvels, monsters,
which called into question accepted viewpoints. These special cases compelled
naturalists to reassess traditional views and look for better explanations.
3
In its
pursuit of information on skin color, the Society began with the useful purpose of
challenging beliefs in the curse of Ham and the climate theory. However it created
a special case out of black skin, and thus featured in its museum the representation
of an African evacuated of subjectivity, identity, or culture. The specimen of the
“entire SKIN of a MOOR” was offered as a “curiosity” or “marvel” available to
naturalists and tourists from 1669 until at least 1686, but probably throughout the
early eighteenth century. The particulars that were the goal of the Society’s global
acquisition of information dissociated the people they studied from their homeland,
experience, and humanity, and reduced them to surfaces, and, eventually, to the
stereotypes of the colonial and imperial project.
There is no question that some useful science was accomplished in the
process; Sidney N. Klaus tells the story of how naturalists accumulated evidence
about pigmentation during this period. However, Klaus’s goal to outline the
achievements of “the Age of Discovery” relegates the more problematic aspects
of the story to ironic asides.
4
He never considers the possibility that the empirical
approach developed at the time could be used to promote the vested interests of
3
Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone
Books, 1998), Chapter 6. The phrases “collective empiricism” and “view from nowhere”
are used in Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone, 2007), pp. 4–5, 19.
See also Daston, “Baconian Facts, Academic Civility, and the Prehistory of Objectivity,”
Annals of Scholarship 8 (1991): 337–63.
4
Klaus writes, “In 1677, three years after Malpighi published his findings, Johann
Pechlin, a Dutch anatomist, used Malpighi’s method of dissection to make a thorough
study of Ethiopian skin … Pechlin was concerned that his results obtained using cadaver
skin might not be the same had he studied living skin. To his dismay, he was unable to
convince living subjects to cooperate in his experiments [quoting Pechlin] ‘… because of
I don’t know what sort of evil on the part of the Negroes,’” “A History of the Science of
Pigmentation,” in James J. Nordlund, et al. (eds), The Pigmentary System: Physiology and
Pathophysiology, (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), pp. 6, 8. Thanks to Sanford Freedman
for bringing this volume to my attention. Renato Mazzolini considers both the knowledge
gained and the ideology involved in European natural philosophy in “Skin Colour and
the Origin of Physical Anthropology,” The Warburg Institute Lecture, March 6, 2002,
especially p. 17–18. He does not consider the Royal Society specifically.

Race and the Experimental Method in the Society 31
English naturalists. Klaus believes that “political and social forces” intruded into
“the disciplines of anatomy and biology” only at the end of the eighteenth century,
but the engagement of the members of the Royal Society in colonialism calls this
into question.
I. Boyle on Colors
Boyle’s Experiments and Considerations touching Colours (1664) is considered
a fundamental work in the development of British empiricism.
5
Boyle included
“Experiment XI” on “The Blackness of the Skin, and Hair of Negroes” in the
volume to demonstrate that skin color was a topic that the new experimental method
could usefully address.
6
Boyle’s work on colors is valued in the history of optics
because it affirmed accurately that objects are seen as white because they reflect all
light, and objects are seen as black because they absorb all light.
7
Perhaps written
in the late l650s but published in 1664, it was an early example of what Francis
Bacon had called for in the Novum Organum: data-collection and experiment that
would free natural philosophy from Aristotelian traditions.
8
Bacon writes, “For
first of all we must prepare a Natural and Experimental History, sufficient and
good; and this is the foundation of all; for we are not to imagine or suppose,
but to discover, what nature does or may be made to do.”
9
The latter half of this
5
Hunter, Boyle: Between God and Science, p. 118. I quote from the modern edition
in Boyle, Works, vol. 4, pp. 3–184. Subsequent page numbers to this edition will appear in
the text.
6
“Experiment XI,” Works, vol. 4, pp. 84–93. The Table of Contents lists “The
eleventh Experiment, about the Blackness of the Skin, and Hair of Negroes, and Inhabitants
of Hot Climates …” (p. 18).
7
Marie Boas Hall, introduction to a facsimile of the 1664 edition of Boyles’s
Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (New York: Johnson Reprint
Corporation, 1964), pp. xiv–xv. See also Boyle, Works, vol. 4, pp. xi–xvi. Newton settled
many of the debates at the time by arguing that colors are not modifications of light
created by deflecting bodies, but that “light itself is a Heterogeneous mixture of differently
refrangible Rays.” For theories of color at the time including Aristotle’s, see the introduction
to The Optical Papers of Isaac Newton, ed. Alan E. Shapiro (2 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1984) vol. 1, pp. 1–10, and A.I. Sabra, Theories of Light from Descartes
to Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Sabra (p. 240) quotes from
Newton’s Correspondence, ed. H.W. Turnbull (7 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1959), vol. 1, p. 95. Taylor considers the racialization of “reflection” in early modern
optics, pp. 294–301.
8
On data collection, see Barbara Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-
Century England: A Study of the Relationships between Natural Science, Religion, History,
Law, and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 16. Hunter dates the
work on colors to a period from 1655–1656 onwards in Boyle, Works, vol. 4, p. xi.
9
Francis Bacon, Works,vol. 4, p. 127.

Studies of Skin Color in the Early Royal Society32
quotation appeared on the title page of Boyle’s work on colors.
10
Bacon claims that
observation and experiment must be the basis for any theory, and should replace
theory as the first work of the naturalist. Similarly, Boyle states in his preface
“That the professed Design of this Treatise is to deliver things rather Historical
than Dogmatical”; that is, Boyle will offer particular examples and experiments
rather than an overarching explanation for the cause of colors (p. 5).
Boyle seems to have Bacon’s Novum Organum in mind as he writes. The
Novum Organum notes “whiteness” and “the nature of color” as issues that deserve
rethinking using Bacon’s method. Recognizing that the project of data-collection
he is proposing is “various and diffuse,” Bacon outlines several “instances,” or
examples of the particular details he thought would lead to new understandings.
As an example of a “Solitary Instance,” Bacon cites prisms, since it is unlike other
things that produce color, like “flowers, coloured stones, metals, woods.” Bacon,
like Boyle, seeks to refute Aristotle’s claim that color inhered in the object. That
both prisms and flowers show color demonstrates, according to Bacon, that “colour
is nothing more than a modification of the light received upon the object, resulting
in the former case from the different degrees of incidence, in the latter from the
various textures and configurations of the body.”
11
This is very similar to Boyle’s
carefully worded view on the subject: “though this be at present the Hypothesis I
preferr, yet I propose but in a General Sense, teaching only that the Beams of light,
Modify’d by the Bodies whence they are sent (Reflected or Refracted) to the Eye,
produce there that Kind of Sensation, Men commonly call Colour …”. (p. 59).
Boyle also follows Baconian methods in his chapter on skin color.
12
Just as
the work as a whole refutes Aristotelian explanations for color, so “Experiment
XI” disputes popular explanations for black skin color, particularly the curse of
Ham and the climate theory, in which skin color was understood as a sign of
temperament and the result of geography.
13
In Boyle’s description of his method in
the chapter, as well as the work as a whole, he uses his characteristic tentativeness:
10
“Non fingendum, aut excogitandum, sed inveniendum, quid natura faciat, aut ferat.”
It also appeared on the title page of his New Experiments and Observations Touching Cold
(1665). See Michael Hunter, “Robert Boyle and the Early Royal Society: A Reciprocal
Exchange in the Making of Baconian Science,” British Journal for the History of Science
[2007], 40/6; p. 7, note 27. Note 11 cites previous work on Boyle and Bacon.
11
Francis Bacon, Works, vol. 4, p. 155.
12
Boyle also borrows heavily from Thomas Browne’s “Of the Blackness of Negroes,”
in Pseudodoxia (1646), Book 6, Chapters 10–12 (The Works of Sir Thomas Browne [3 vols,
John Grant: Edinburgh, 1912], vol. 2, pp. 367–95), although Browne does not include the
distinction between matters of fact and governing theories. Jordan shows how conventional
much of Browne’s and Boyle’s commentary is, although not the linking with physics or
Boyle’s connection of the issue with experiment (White Over Black, p. 1–43).
13
On the climate theory, see Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race, and Wheeler,
The Complexion of Race. On the curse of Ham or Cham, the belief that one of the three
sons of Noah was punished with black skin and slavery for seeing his father naked (Genesis
9:18–27), see Benjamin Braude, “The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and

Race and the Experimental Method in the Society 33
The General Opinion [the climate theory] (to be mention’d a little lower) has
been rejected even by some of the Antient Geographers, and among the Moderns
Ortelius and divers other Learned Men have Question’d it. But this is no place
to mention what thoughts I have had to and fro about these Matters: Only as I
shall freely Acknowledge, that the Enquiry seems more Abstruse than it does to
many others, and that because consulting with Authors, and Books of Voyages,
and with Travellers, to satisfie my self in matters of Fact, I have met with some
things among them, which seem not to agree very well with the Notions of the
most Classick Authors concerning these things; for it being my Present Work to
deliver rather matters Historical than Theorys, I shall Annex some few of my
Collections, instead of a Solemn Disputation. (pp. 84–5)
A “Solemn Disputation” would be presented by an Aristotelian to prove a theory
according to logic; Boyle uses “matters Historical,” or bits of information in travel
narratives and conversations he has had with travelers, to consider the validity of
prevailing theories. He is at all times careful not to generalize. It seems remarkable
that he would state, “But this is no place to mention what thoughts I have had to and
fro about these Matters,” since this seems to be exactly what he is doing. However,
his point seems to be that, while he will restrain himself at this point in the chapter
from divulging any theories he might have developed, he is “freely” and openly
acknowledging his doubts about the opinions of the “most Classic Authors.”
Boyle organizes the chapter through the collection of “matters of fact” rather
than governing theories. Historians of science Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer
have identified this method as fundamental to the Royal Society in their study
of Boyle’s experiments with the air-pump.
14
However, for Daston and Park,
information gained from “experimental manipulation” is not as important as what
Daston calls “Baconian facts”:
What chiefly distinguishes the new empiricism of facts from the old empiricism
of experience was not experiment but the sharp distinction between a datum of
experience, experimental or observational, and any inference drawn from it.
15
Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods,” William and Mary
Quarterly 54 (1997): 135–9; and David M. Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham: Race and
Slavery in Early Christianity, Judaism, and Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2005).
14
Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, pp. 22–4, 69, 77–8. For an
opposing view on “matters of fact,” see Rose-Mary Sargent, “Scientific Experiment and
Legal Expertise: the Way of Experience in Seventeenth-Century England,” Studies in
History and Philosophy of Science 20 (1989): 19–45. See also Mary Poovey, A History of
the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1998).
15
Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, p. 237. Barbara Shapiro seems
to concur with their view, “The crucial term, ‘matter of fact,’ … now encompassed both
the results of observing quiescent nature and experimental manipulation,” Probability and
Certainty, pp. 19–20.

Studies of Skin Color in the Early Royal Society34
Boyle makes this very point by entitling his chapter on skin color, “Experiment
XI.” This is probably a joke, since he admits at the end that “it is high time for
me to dismiss Observations, and go on with Experiments” (p. 93). But the chapter
uses the same method as the rest of his chapters on experiments since it privileges
matters of fact over “any inference drawn from it.” In Thomas Sprat’s account
of the Society’s experiments in The History of the Royal-Society of London For
the Improving of Natural Knowledge (1667), Sprat spends two sentences on
the experiment, and sixteen pages in describing the process of sharing general
knowledge before the experiment, and discussing it afterwards “to judg, and to
resolve upon the matter of Fact.”
16
In “Experiment XI,” Boyle gathers evidence that suggests the problems with
the climate theory: people in the same latitude have different complexions, African
children turn black without exposure to the sun, transplanted black Africans do
not lose their color, groups of people on two sides of the same river have different
complexions. So with the theory of the curse of Ham: the Bible does not identify
the cursed Cham with black skin, Africans consider whiteness not blackness a
curse, standards of beauty are relative.
Boyle may find “The Blackness of the Skin, and Hair of Negroes” to be an
example of what Bacon calls “Singular Instances.” According to Bacon, “They
are such as exhibit bodies in the concrete, which seem to be out of the course
and broken off from the order of nature, and not agreeing with other bodies of
the same kind.”
17
Boyle opens Experiment XI by claiming that inquiries into the
cause of black skin should have considered why some animals in a particular
species have black fur: “why some whole races of other Animals besides Men, as
Foxes and Hares, are Distinguished by a Blackness not familiar to the Generality
of Animals of the same Species …”. (p. 84). Although this line of thought affirms
that blackness is natural, and undermines the curse of Ham, or what Boyle calls
a “supernatural cause,” the formulation also describes blackness as not general,
but special, unfamiliar, uncharacteristic of the bulk or majority of people. By
“not familiar,” Boyle might be using the word not only to mean unknown or
uncommon, but also in its earlier meaning of not “pertaining to one’s family or
household,” that is, set apart from, not included in the general group.
18
If Boyle
considers black skin to be one of Bacon’s “Singular Instances,” then he may also
believe that studying it could lead to the discovery of principles applicable to
humans in general, as Bacon claims in his description. Bacon writes, “For we are
not to give up the investigation, until the properties and qualities found in such
things as may be taken for miracles of nature be reduced and comprehended under
16
Sprat, pp. 95–111.
17
“Examples of singular Instances are the sun and moon among stars; the magnet
among stones; quicksilver among metals; the elephant among quadrupeds; the venereal
sense among kinds of touch; the scent of hounds among kinds of smell,” Francis Bacon,
Works, vol. 4, p. 168.
18
Oxford English Dictionary, “familiar,” A.1.a.

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And it has widened and widened, until there is no longer any room for a
circle on our Flag; but spangled like the sky at night, it has become the Star-
Spangled Banner.
THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER
A mysterious foreign stranger suddenly appeared in New York City, after
John Adams had retired from the presidency. He was handsome, with
beaming hazel eyes and flashing white teeth. He was graceful, with courtly
manners. He called himself George Martin.
But what his real name was, or what his mysterious purpose was, only a
few people knew.
He was dined and toasted by New York officials. He went to the City of
Washington on his secret mission. He was granted private interviews by the
President and Secretary of State. He talked much about his friends
Catherine the Great of Russia and William Pitt of England. He seemed to
know the secret plots and political intrigues of Europe.
Then he vanished as mysteriously as he had come.
A few weeks later, John Adams heard the astounding news. The stranger
was no other than the celebrated South American Patriot, Don Francisco de
Miranda. He had sailed away secretly from New York in a little ship laden
with arms and ammunition. And, what was worse, he had taken with him a
band of young American men, some of them mere boys; and he was sailing
toward the Spanish main with the intention of freeing South America from
Spanish rule.
He had taken with him young William Steuben Smith, John Adams’s
grandson. Young Smith was a college boy, very bright and courageous, and
thirsty for adventure.
“What do you think were my sensations and reflections?” wrote John
Adams to a friend. “I shudder to this moment, at the recollection of them! I
saw the ruin of my only daughter and her good-hearted, enthusiastic
husband, and had no other hope or wish or prayer than that the ship, with
my grandson in it, might be sunk in a storm in the Gulf Stream!”
For young William Steuben Smith’s father was surveyor of the port of
New York, and had allowed Miranda’s ship to clear with arms and
ammunition in its hold, to be used against Spain with whom we were at
peace.

Then came to John Adams the terrible news, that Spanish armed vessels
had captured some of the American boys. His grandson had been captured,
and thrown into a dungeon in a dark, filthy fortress in Venezuela. He was to
be tried as a pirate taken on the high seas, and without doubt he would be
hanged.
The Spanish Ambassador, who had known John Adams in Europe,
hastened to offer his services. He would intercede with Spain for the
grandson, he said.
“No,” said John Adams to a friend; “he should share the fate of his
colleagues, comrades, and fellow-prisoners.”
But happily it was all a great mistake. Young Smith was not hanged as a
pirate. He had not been captured at all. Instead, he was sailing gayly on in
Miranda’s Mystery Ship. He had been made aid-de-camp and lieutenant-
colonel, and had donned Miranda’s brilliant uniform.
For the story of what happened further to the Mystery Ship, see page
335.
HIS LAST TOAST
It was the last day of June, 1826. In five days, it would be the Fourth of
July—the Fiftieth Anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of
Independence. John Adams had been one of the committee to frame the
Declaration.
A neighbour was sitting with John Adams in his home in Quincy—that
used to be Braintree. Ninety and one years old was John Adams!
The neighbour was to be orator at the annual banquet on the Fourth of
July. He had called to ask John Adams to compose the toast.
“Independence for ever!” said John Adams.
But would he not wish to add something further to the toast, asked the
neighbour.
“Not a word,” replied John Adams.
The Fourth of July dawned. The great Patriot lay dying. At the setting of
the sun, those who stood beside him heard him whisper:—“Thomas
Jefferson still lives!”
As the sun sank out of sight, a loud cheering came from the village. It
was the shouts of the people at the words of his toast:—“Independence for

ever!”
The cheering echoed through the room where John Adams was. But
before its last sounds could die away, the great Patriot had passed into
history and eternity—on the Fourth of July,—on the Fiftieth Anniversary of
the Signing of the Declaration of Independence!

NOVEMBER 15
WILLIAM PITT, EARL OF CHATHAM DEFENDER
OF AMERICA
The Colonists are ... equally entitled with yourselves to all the natural
rights of mankind, and the peculiar privileges of Englishmen.
William Pitt
He at once breathed his own lofty spirit into the Country he served, as he
communicated something of his own grandeur to the men who served him.
“No man,” said a soldier of the time, “ever entered Mr. Pitt’s closet, who
did not feel himself braver when he came out, than when he went in.”
John Richard Green
He stands in the annals of Europe, “an illustrious and venerable name,”
admired by countrymen and strangers, by all to whom loftiness of moral
principle and greatness of talent are objects of regard.
Thomas Carlyle
William Pitt was born in England,
November 15, 1708
Created Earl of Chatham, 1766
He died May 11, 1778
He was known “as the Great Commoner,”
while in the House of Commons; as
“Chatham,” after he entered the House of
Lords; and as “the Elder Pitt,” to
distinguish him from his son William Pitt,
called “the Younger,” who likewise was a
great statesman.
There are American towns and cities named
in honour of William Pitt, our Defender;

among them, Pittsburgh, Penn.; Chatham,
N. Y.; and Pittsfield, Mass.
THIS TERRIBLE CORNET OF HORSE
In the hilt of Napoleon’s ceremonial sword, was set a huge diamond, one of
the largest in the world. It had been brought from India by “Diamond Pitt”
of England, who had sold it to the Regent of France.
“Diamond Pitt,” was Thomas Pitt. An adventurous young sailor, he had
gone to India, and had started in business for himself as a trader.
The British East India Company claimed the monopoly of trade in India.
When the bold young Englishman, without so much as “by your leave,”
started an opposition business, the Company determined to crush him.
It set its powerful legal machinery to work. But it was one thing to try to
crush Thomas Pitt, and quite another thing to do it. He fought desperately
for his rights. Though he was arrested and fined he still kept on trading, in
defiance of the Company. He battled so successfully and for so many years,
that at last for its own protection, the Company was forced to take him into
its service.
He rose to be Governor of Madras. He became known as “Diamond
Pitt,” because he was always in search of large diamonds. Thus he procured
the famous “Pitt Diamond,” which found its way into Napoleon’s sword.
With a part of the fortune which “Diamond Pitt” got from its sale, he
bought an estate in England. Later he became a member of Parliament.
“Diamond Pitt’s” grandson, William Pitt, was not a strong boy. He spent
much time with his books. He liked to read Shakespeare aloud to the family.
He enjoyed reading the Faëry Queen, in which the Red Cross Knight,
fearless of harm or evil thing, rides about rescuing the innocent and
helpless.
Though he was not strong in body, William Pitt had an iron will. He had
“Diamond Pitt’s” indomitable courage and the fighting qualities with which
the sailor had matched his strength against that of the powerful East India
Company.
William Pitt attended Oxford University. When he was twenty-three, he
was commissioned Cornet of Horse in the King’s Blues.

The fearless Cornet of Horse was soon elected to the House of
Commons. He started his political career in the House with a fiery, sarcastic
speech supporting the Prince of Wales, who was at enmity with the King his
father.
William Pitt was a born orator. He was tall, elegant, and graceful. His
eyes were bright and piercing. He spoke with dignified gesture. And he
delivered this speech with such strength, magnetism, and irony, that the
Prime Minister exclaimed, “We must muzzle this terrible Cornet of Horse!”
To muzzle him, he tried, at first with promises of reward. But William
Pitt was incorruptible. He would not sell his honour. Then influence was
brought to bear, and the young Cornet of Horse was dismissed from the
army.
But this very act, by which his enemies planned to muzzle William Pitt,
brought him before the public eye. His fearlessness and remarkable oratory
advanced him daily with both Parliament and People.
In time, William Pitt became a leading power, at first in the House of
Commons, and afterward, when he was created Earl of Chatham, in the
House of Lords. He served twice as Prime Minister of England; and he laid
the solid foundations of the British Colonial Empire.
But more than all else, he was an Englishman defending the unalienable
rights of all Englishmen. He steadfastly combated those political evils in the
British Government, which, at that time, were threatening to undermine
English Liberty as set down in the Magna Carta and safeguarded by the
English Constitution.
THE CHARTER OF LIBERTY
The Signing of the Magna Carta, 1215

O Thou, that sendest out the man
To rule by land and sea,
Strong mother of a Lion-line,
Be proud of those strong sons of thine,
Who wrenched their rights from thee!
What wonder if in noble heat,
Those men thine arms withstood,
Retaught the lesson thou hadst taught,
And in thy spirit with thee fought fought—
Who sprang from English blood!
Alfred Tennyson (Condensed)
Magna Carta! The Great Charter of the liberties of Englishmen!
At Runnimede, the freemen of England through the action of their
Barons, forced King John to sign and seal the Magna Carta. His tyrannous
power was torn from him. He was forced to pledge himself to violate no
longer the rights and privileges of English freemen.
For, from times remote, human rights and liberties, protecting them from
oppression by rulers, had been theirs by laws and by common consent.
About a hundred years after the signing of the Magna Carta, the great
principle, that English freemen should not be taxed without representation,
was established.
When King Charles the First broke his promises to respect the rights of
his subjects, he was tried and executed. When King James the Second
governed in despotic manner, exercising what he believed to be the “divine
right of Kings,” he lost his throne.
What has this to do with America and William Pitt? Everything!
During the reigns of the Stuart Kings, large sections of America were
explored and settled by English freemen, who came to America to escape
persecution, and to enjoy English Liberty which at that time they could not
possibly have had in England.
The Stuart Kings believed in “divine right,” which means that the King
is the Lord’s annointed, and that neither Parliament nor People may

question any of his acts; and that no matter how cruel or tyrannous a King
may be, the People must submissively obey him.
The Magna Carta and the English Constitution protect the English
People against this doctrine of “divine right.”
So, when during the reign of these Kings, men and women fled from
England to find Liberty and refuge in America, they brought with them their
ancient institutions, the rights and privileges guaranteed them under the
Magna Carta.
There were other Englishmen equally courageous, equally liberty-loving,
who came to seek their fortunes and build homes in the New World. They,
too, brought with them their rights and privileges.
These English pioneers hewed their way through the savage wilderness.
Many of them were massacred by Red Men, while their homes were
burned; some of them were carried into captivity and tortured. Yet the great
body of undaunted English settlers, resolutely kept on pushing their
frontiers westward. They laid out farms and plantations, they built villages
and towns, they founded churches and schools. They obtained charters from
far away England, confirming their rights. And through God’s blessing they
prospered, and became strong and rich.
Other liberty-loving folk, the Dutch, settled in great numbers in what is
now New York and New Jersey; while many settlers from different parts of
Europe, came to the New World to build homes for themselves and their
children.
The very air of America breathed freedom. The magnitude of the country
and the difficulties of pioneer-life helped to invigorate, expand, and make
indomitable those ideals of English Liberty which the first settlers and
frontiersmen had brought with them.
When King George the Third inherited the British Crown, he was unable
to understand the free spirit of Englishmen. And he was far from realizing
its tremendous growth in the New World.
He taxed the Americans without representation. He placed a standing
army in the Colonies, without their consent. He blockaded the Port of
Boston to force her to submit to his unjust laws. In some cases, trial by jury
was abolished. These are some of his tyrannous violations of the rights and
privileges of English freemen.
The People of America, in indignation, petitioned the King for redress.

There was no redress.
So the People of America rose in arms; and, in the true spirit of Magna
Carta, they issued the Declaration of Independence.
Now, we shall see what William Pitt had to do with all this.
AMERICA’S DEFENDER
“For the defence of Liberty, upon a general principle, upon a
constitutional principle, it is a ground on which I stand firm, on which I
dare meet any man.”
“This Country had no right under Heaven to tax America! It is
contrary to all the principles of justice and civil policy.”
“If I were an American,” he exclaimed, “as I am an Englishman,
while a foreign troop was landed in my Country, I never would lay down
my arms—never—never—never!”
William Pitt, Earl of Chatham
It was natural that an English statesman who sincerely and firmly believed
in the rights of all Englishmen, should become the defender of America.
And her loyal friend and champion was William Pitt. By the weight of his
eloquent speeches, he fought her battles in Parliament.
When the Stamp Act was passed, he was absent from his place in
Parliament, because of illness. But later, he was present. Leaning on his
crutch, for he was still very sick, he indignantly arraigned the British
Ministry which had brought about the passage of the Act.
“When the resolution was taken in this House to tax America,” he
said, “I was ill in bed. If I could have endured to have been carried in my
bed, so great was the agitation of my mind for the consequences, I would
have solicited some kind hand to have laid me down on this floor, to
have borne my testimony against it!
“The Colonists are the subjects of this Kingdom, equally entitled with
yourselves to all the natural rights of mankind and the peculiar privileges
of Englishmen; equally bound by its laws, and equally participating in
the Constitution of this free Country. The Americans are the sons ... of
England!”
And when one of the members made a speech abusing the Americans,
defending the Stamp Act, and accusing Pitt of sowing sedition among the
American Colonists, he rose and answered:—
“The gentleman tells us,” he said, “America is obstinate; America is
almost in open rebellion. I rejoice that America has resisted. Three

millions of people so dead to all the feelings of Liberty, as voluntarily to
let themselves be made slaves, would have been fit instruments to make
slaves of all the rest.
“In a good cause, on a sound bottom, the force of this Country can
crush America to atoms. I know the valour of your troops, I know the
skill of your officers.... But on this ground,—on the Stamp Act—when
so many here will think it a crying injustice, I am one who will lift up
my hands against it!
“In such a cause, even your success would be hazardous. America, if
she fell, would fall like the strong man. She would embrace the pillars of
the State, and pull down the Constitution along with her.
“Is this your boasted peace? To sheathe the sword, not in its scabbard,
but in the bowels of your Countrymen?
“Upon the whole, I will beg leave to tell the House what is really my
opinion. It is that the Stamp Act be repealed absolutely, totally, and
immediately.”
[2]
. . . . . . . . . .
And whether the Stamp Act was repealed “absolutely, totally, and
immediately,” John Fiske tells in his thrilling history, “The American
Revolution.”
THE SONS OF LIBERTY
William Pitt was not the only English statesman who championed
America. There was Lord Rockingham, at one time Prime Minister of
England, also the Earl of Camden, and the celebrated Charles James Fox.
And there was Edmund Burke, “one of the earliest friends of America,”
with his scratch wig, round spectacles, and pockets stuffed with papers. He
pleaded our cause so brilliantly that his hearers were dazzled by his oratory
“with its passionate ardour, its poetic fancy, its amazing prodigality of
resources, the dazzling succession in which irony, pathos, invective,
tenderness, the most brilliant word-pictures, the coolest arguments,
followed each other.”
And among America’s British friends, was Colonel Barré, a member of
the House of Commons. In an indignant speech against the Stamp Act, he
referred to the American Patriots as “Sons of Liberty.”
When his speech reached America, the name “Sons of Liberty” was
adopted by secret societies pledged to resist the Stamp Act.

In Boston, the Sons of Liberty held meetings under the Liberty Tree, a
huge elm; they met also in Faneuil Hall, since called “the Cradle of
American Liberty.” In New York City, the Sons of Liberty erected a tall
Liberty Pole, and defended it against the Red Coats.
All over the Country, the Sons of Liberty were active, sometimes too
violently so, in the cause of American Independence.
A LAST SCENE
In 1778, a dramatic event took place in the House of Lords.
William Pitt, old now and wasted by disease, but the fire of whose
genius still burned bright and clear, was about to speak.
France had acknowledged the Independence of the United States.
Germany was planning to do so; while Spain stood ready to enter into an
alliance with the Americans. England was at war with France. The situation
of England seemed desperate.
And on that dramatic day in the House of Lords, the Duke of Richmond
was about to move that the royal fleets and armies should be instantly
withdrawn from America, and peace be made on whatever terms Congress
might see fit to accept.
But William Pitt would not willingly consent to a step that seemed
certain to wreck the Empire his genius had won for England.
He had got up from his sick bed, and had come into the House of Lords
to argue against the motion.
Wrapped in flannel bandages, and leaning upon crutches, his dark eyes
in their brilliancy enhancing the pallor of his careworn face, as he entered
the House, supported on the one side by his son-in-law, and on the other by
that younger son who was so soon to add fresh glory to the name of William
Pitt, the peers all started to their feet, and remained standing until he had
taken his place.
In broken sentences, with strange flashes of the eloquence which had
once held captive ear and heart, he protested against the hasty adoption of a
measure which simply prostrated the dignity of England before its ancient
enemy, the House of Bourbon.
The Duke of Richmond’s answer, reverently and delicately worded,
urged that while the magic of Chatham’s name could work anything short of

miracles, yet only a miracle could now relieve them from the dire necessity
of abandoning America.
Chatham rose to reply, but his overwrought frame gave way, and he sank
in a swoon upon the floor.
All business was at once adjourned. The peers, with eager sympathy,
came crowding up to offer assistance, and the unconscious statesman was
carried in the arms of his friends to a house near by, whence in a few days
he was removed to his home.
There, after lingering between life and death for several weeks, on the
11th of May, and in the seventieth year of his age, Lord Chatham breathed
his last.
The man thus struck down like a soldier at his post, was one whom
Americans, no less than Englishmen, have delighted to honour.
John Fiske (Retold)

DECEMBER 2
DOM PEDRO THE SECOND THE MAGNANIMOUS
THE BEST REPUBLICAN IN BRAZIL
TO
H. M. DOM PEDRO II
EMPEROR OF BRAZIL
SCHOLAR AND SCIENTIST, PATRON OF
ARTS AND LETTERS
STERLING STATESMAN AND MODEL MONARCH,
WHOSE REIGN OF HALF A CENTURY HAS BEEN
ZEALOUSLY AND SUCCESSFULLY DEVOTED TO
PUBLIC INSTRUCTION, INDUSTRIAL
ENTERPRISE, AND THE ABOLITION
OF SLAVERY
THROUGHOUT THE VAST AND OPULENT
“EMPIRE OF THE SOUTHERN CROSS”
Dedication by Frank Vincent
FREEDOM IN BRAZIL

With clearer light, Cross of the South shine forth
In blue Brazilian skies:
And thou, O River, cleaving half the earth,
From sunset to sunrise,
From the great mountains to the Atlantic waves,
Thy joy’s long anthem pour,
Yet a few years (God make them less!) and slaves
Shall shame thy pride no more.
No fettered feet thy shaded margins press,
But all men shall walk free.
Where, thou the high-priest of the wilderness,
Hast wedded sea to sea.
And thou, great-hearted Ruler, through whose mouth
The word of God is said
Once more:—“Let there be light!”—Son of the South,
Lift up thy honoured head,
Wear unashamed a crown by thy desert
More than by birth thy own,
Careless of watch and ward; thou art begirt
By grateful hearts alone.
The moated wall and battleship may fail,
But safe shall Justice prove;
Stronger than greaves of brass or iron mail,
The panoply of Love.
John Greenleaf Whittier
(Condensed)
Dom Pedro was born December 2, 1825
Was made Emperor at five years of age,
April 7, 1831
Visited the United States, 1876
His daughter, Princess Isabel, emancipated
the slaves, 1888

He abdicated, and Brazil was proclaimed a
Republic, 1889
Dom Pedro died, December 5, 1891.
THE BRAZILS MAGNIFICENT
Robinson Crusoe, after escaping from Moorish slavery with the boy Xury,
was rescued by a Portuguese ship bound for South America. He was carried
by the ship’s captain to the Brazils.
There he settled, bought a plantation and made a fortune. Then, away
from those same Brazils, he sailed and was wrecked and cast upon his
Desert Island.
Magnificent and rich were Robinson Crusoe’s Brazils, or the Country of
Brazil, stretching vast and unknown far westward into the interior of the
continent. Near the sea-coast, in the parts inhabited by civilized men, were
plantations of coffee, tobacco, and fruits. Primeval forests covered the
shores of the rivers whose mighty waters rushed far out into the ocean.
Fierce savages roved the forests. There were gold, spices, and diamonds in
Robinson Crusoe’s Brazils, and rare woods, brilliant birds, butterflies, and
flowers.
And so is the country of Brazil to-day—a magnificent land! Only there
are cities there now, and towns and villages. And to-day, Brazil is a
Republic with a Constitution like that of our own United States.
In Robinson Crusoe’s time, Brazil was owned and ruled by the Kingdom
of Portugal, just as other parts of South America were owned and ruled by
the Crown of Spain.
How Brazil won Independence and became a Republic, is a fascinating
story.
THE EMPIRE OF THE SOUTHERN CROSS
Brazil , on which the Southern Cross of four bright stars, looks down, first
became a Kingdom, then an Empire and after that a Republic.
When Napoleon’s Army threatened to invade Portugal, the Royal Family
of Portugal fled in terror of their lives. They escaped from Lisbon, crossed
the Atlantic, and found refuge in the royal Colony of Brazil.

In 1815, Brazil was declared a Kingdom, though still to remain a part of
Portugal. The first and only European Kingdom in America!
When the time arrived, that the Royal Family might safely return to
Portugal, the King left his son, Dom Pedro, to be Regent or Governor of
Brazil.
But the Brazilians had grown used to having their King live among
them. More just laws and greater privileges were theirs, when their ruler
lived in the land. He could understand their needs better than if he ruled
them from Europe. So the Brazilians became dissatisfied, when their
country was reduced once more to the state of a Colony.
Dom Pedro was a patriotic Brazilian, and ruled the Country without
much regard to Portugal’s wishes. Trouble soon arose between the Mother
Country and Brazil. Dom Pedro proclaimed the Independence of Brazil,
September 7, 1822. An Empire was established, and Dom Pedro was made
Emperor under a Constitution.
But as time went on, the Emperor did not uphold the People’s rights; so
he was forced to abdicate in favour of his little son, Dom Pedro, who was
only five years old.
After which, Dom Pedro the First, sailed away to Europe, leaving little
Dom Pedro the Second, to rule in his stead.
MAKING THE LITTLE EMPEROR
“The King is afloat! God save the King!” were the shouts which rang
through the streets of Rio Janeiro, for now that their Emperor Pedro the
First had abdicated and escaped on an English man-o-war, the people were
giving themselves up to rejoicing.
“The King is afloat! God save the King!” was the cry of the townspeople
and the streets, festooned with coffee branches, were made to glow with
coloured silks, while the balconies were thronged with señoritas in all their
finery of brilliant dresses, garlands, fluttering fans, and feather flowers.
They were witnessing the triumphal entry into his capital of the new
Emperor, Dom Pedro the Second, the little lad of five and a half years old.
First in the procession of the Child-Emperor, were justices of the peace
bearing green flags. Then came the little Emperor.

And what a figure was this! A tiny infant in a huge state-coach, dragged
by four strings of excited mulattoes! He cried, and at the same time waved a
white handkerchief.
The tender-hearted Brazilians, every man and woman of their number a
child-adorer, were altogether overcome by the sight, and even the choir that
accompanied the procession, was touched. Its triumphant chant died away
in an emotional quiver.
With great pomp, little Pedro was installed as Emperor, the eyes of the
enthusiastic spectators swimming with tears, as he was carried out of the
chapel in the arms of an old chamberlain.
Later, while sitting in a little chair at the window of the palace, he
reviewed the troops of his Empire.
But though little Pedro was now Emperor of all Brazil, he was too young
to rule. A Regent ruled for him for ten years, while Pedro studied and
prepared himself to govern his People.
W. H. Koebel and Other Sources
THE PATRIOT EMPEROR
I
Viva Dom Pedro the Second!
At last a large political party in the capital grew tired of installing Regents
and electing new ministers, and insistently demanded that the Emperor
himself begin to reign, although legally he was still too young. According to
the Constitution, an Emperor reached his majority at the age of eighteen,
and Dom Pedro was only fifteen. But in spite of his youth, Dom Pedro the
Second was declared constitutional Emperor and perpetual defender of
Brazil. Viva Dom Pedro the Second!
So mature was the young Emperor in mind and appearance, that he was
well fitted to play the part of an eighteen-year-old. His tutors were the best
that could be found in Europe or South America, and he was a brilliant
student. He had a trick of relighting his lamp at night and studying for a
while after every one had gone to bed. Natural history, mathematics, and
astronomy were his favourite subjects at that time.
But in the course of his life he studied almost everything under the sun,
and he could talk fluently on any subject in English, German, French,

Italian or Spanish; he read Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. When he was sixty he
learned Sanskrit. His library was packed with histories, biographies,
encyclopædias, and law-books.
Besides his library the Emperor loved peace, happiness, and prosperity.
These were his gifts to Brazil during his long reign, while surrounding
Nations were struggling with anarchy and civil war.
Before Dom Pedro was eighteen, he signed a contract of marriage with a
Princess whom he had never seen, Theresa Christina Maria, sister of the
King of the two Sicilies. A Brazilian squadron conducted her to Rio, and the
city received her with splendid ceremonies.
II
My People
Under Dom Pedro’s guiding influence, Brazil gained steadily in power,
importance, and reputation. Home industries and foreign commerce
doubled. Telegraphic communications were established with the United
States and Europe. Good steamship lines, both coastwise and oceanic, made
Brazil accessible to all the world. Public property was opened to settlement,
and the Government became as hospitable to all foreign enterprise as it had
before this been exclusive.
Above all things, Dom Pedro wanted to stimulate the love of knowledge
among his People, to give the boys and girls of every class an equal chance.
Free public schools were established all over the Empire.
One time, the Emperor learned that 3,000,000 francs had been pledged
by citizens for a fine bronze statue of himself to be given the place of
honour in a city square. Dom Pedro, expressing his deep gratitude, said that
it would please him far more if the money could be used for public schools
instead. The grade and high school buildings of Rio have always been noted
for their beauty, size, and equipment.
While so many of the South American States were lagging far behind the
times, Brazil, under Dom Pedro, caught up with other progressive Nations
of the World. Liberty of speech and religious tolerance were not even
questioned, but taken for granted.
III
Emancipating the Slaves

1888
The greatest national event during Dom Pedro’s reign was the Abolition of
Slavery, and no one worked harder to bring it to pass than the Emperor
himself.
The African slave-trade had been abolished in 1850 and from that time
on public opinion grew more and more in favour of Emancipation, in spite
of the strong opposition of planters and wealthy slave owners.
Following Dom Pedro’s example, many high-minded citizens freed their
own slaves. The slave was enabled to free himself in many ways, such as
raising his own purchase money. The incentive to do this was great, for an
ambitious slave had plenty of chance to rise in the world.
Dom Pedro’s dearest wish was that he might live to see every slave in
the country a free man, and this wish came true in the last year of his reign.
He had gone abroad in poor health, leaving his daughter Isabel as
Regent. When Congress met, the Princess Isabel railroaded the Abolition
Bill through both Houses in eight days, and signed the bill which put the
law into immediate effect.
IV
The Empire of the Southern Cross—No More!
Soon after the humane Princess Isabel had freed the slaves, Dom Pedro
came hastening home from Europe. He landed in Rio, and was received
with genuine enthusiasm. But his loved personality could no longer stand
between the throne and the widespread desire for a Republic together with
the popular discontent aroused by the Princess’s acts.
In 1889, a Republican revolt took the whole Empire by surprise. It had
long been brewing beneath the surface, but so great was the Emperor’s
popularity that Republicans had tacitly agreed to postpone the new
Government until his death.
A rumor that Dom Pedro might abdicate in favour of Princess Isabel, and
thus initiate another generation of monarchy, precipitated the Revolution.
The Republican leagues, with the backing of the army and navy, refused to
wait any longer.
Dom Pedro, summoned from Petropolis by telegram, found a Provisional
Government already organized when he reached the capital. In the Imperial

Palace at Rio, surrounded by insurgents, the old Emperor was told briefly
that his long reign was over.
“We are forced to notify you,” said the ultimatum, “that the Provisional
Government expects from your Patriotism the sacrifice of leaving Brazilian
territory with your family in the shortest possible time.”
Dom Pedro the Second replied simply:—
“I resolve to submit to the command of circumstances and will depart
with my family for Europe to-morrow, leaving this beloved Country to
which I have tried to give firm testimony of my love and my dedication
during nearly half a century as chief of the State. I shall always have kind
remembrances of Brazil and hopes for its prosperity.”
The next day the Imperial Family sailed for Lisbon.
In three days’ time a monarchy had been overthrown without bloodshed
or opposition. The Emperor, who had sometimes been called the best
Republican in Brazil, was replaced by a military dictator.
The homesick Emperor, living in European hotels or rented villas,
“always remained as one on the point of departure, as if he ever expected to
be recalled by his former subjects, a hope which till the last moment would
not die out of his heart.”
Margarette Daniels (Arranged)
THE UNITED STATES OF BRAZIL
Brazil , whose name originally meant the Land of Red Dye Wood, is to-
day, the United States of Brazil with a Constitution like our own. It has a
President, Vice-President, and House of Congress, and an army and navy. It
has railroads, beautiful cities, many towns, and a world commerce.
Brazil exports quantities of rubber, sugar, coffee, and other products. The
milky juice of the caoutchouc or rubber, is gathered largely from the wild
rubber-trees growing in the tropical forests far in the interior of Brazil, or
along the banks of the Amazon. Our United States receives great shipments
of this rubber. The coffee-trees flourish in the famous red earth of Brazil,
producing large crops of the delicious berry, to make happy the breakfast
tables of the world.
There is the friendliest of relations between our United States and Brazil.
It is no uncommon sight to meet Brazilian sailors in their picturesque

uniform, at home on the streets of New York City. And when the statue of
Bolivar, the Liberator of Venezuela, was unveiled in Central Park in 1921,
there was present a detachment of Brazilian Marines detailed from their
battleship anchored in New York Harbour. They made an imposing
appearance, filing down the park-slope of Bolivar Hill, in the military
procession which accompanied President Harding.
The year 1922, the one hundredth anniversary of Brazilian
Independence, has been celebrated by People of the United States. Out of
friendship for Brazil, they have presented her with a statue of Liberty cast
in bronze. Liberty holds aloft two entwined banners, the Brazilian Flag and
the Stars and Stripes. The Brazilian Government has selected one of the
most prominent spots in the city of Rio Janeiro, as a site for the statue.

DECEMBER 20
WILLIAM BRADFORD
AND
THE LANDING OF THE PILGRIMS
The word of God to Leyden came,
Dutch town, by Zuyder Zee:
“Rise up, my Children of no name,
My kings and priests to be.
There is an Empire in the West
Which I will soon unfold,
A thousand harvests in her breast,
Rocks ribbed with iron and gold.”
. . . . . . . . . .
They left the towers of Leyden Town,
They left the Zuyder Zee,
And where they cast their anchor down,
Rose Freedom’s realm to be.”
J. E. Rankin
THE PILGRIM FATHERS
So they left that goodly and pleasant city which had been their resting
place near twelve years.
But they knew they were Pilgrims, and looked not much on these things;
but lift up their eyes to the Heavens, their dearest country, and quieted their
spirits.
Governor William Bradford

William Bradford was born about 1590
The Mayflower reached Cape Cod;
Mayflower Compact signed, November 11,
1620
The Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock,
probably December 20, 1620
William Bradford died, May 9, 1657
THE FATHER OF THE NEW ENGLAND
COLONIES
William Bradford’s birthday, we celebrate on the anniversary of the
landing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock. We do not know the exact date
of his birth.
He was just an ordinary boy living in a small English village. He was
brought up by relatives, for his father and mother had died when he was a
child. They had left him a small fortune, so he was not in want.
When about twelve years old, he began to read the Bible. It interested
him so much, that when older he attended the meetings of some neighbours
who were studying the Bible and worshipping God in their own little
Assembly. Separatists, they were called, for they had separated from the
Established Church of England.
In those days, it was a crime in England for any one to hold or attend
religious meetings of Separatists. The Bible printed in the English tongue,
had long been forbidden reading, but in William Bradford’s days, it was
beginning to be read quite widely, specially by Separatists.
These poor people’s Assemblies were watched by spies and informers.
Separatists were arrested and imprisoned, while some were executed.
Others fled into Holland—brave liberty-loving Holland—where there was
no persecution for religion’s sake.
William Bradford became a Separatist. When about eighteen years old,
he, too, fled into Holland, where he might serve his Lord and Saviour Jesus
Christ, in full liberty of conscience.
For ten years or more he lived in Holland. He was a member of an
English Separatist Church in Leyden, under the gentle rule of its beloved

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Studies Of Skin Color In The Early Royal Society Boyle Cavendish Swift 1st Edition Malcolmson

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Studies Of Skin Color In The Early Royal Society Boyle Cavendish Swift 1st Edition Malcolmson

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