THREE CENTURIES' PERSPECTIVESedition). Later, in adding his "Malay variety," Blumenbach identi-
fied his change as a departure from his old guru Linnaeus: "It be-
came very clear that the Linnaean division of mankind could no
longer be adhered to; for which reason I, in this little work, ceased
like others to follow that illustrious man."
Linnaeus divided his species Homo sapiens into four varieties,
defined primarily by geography and secondarily by three words
indicating color, temperament, and stance. (Linnaeus also included
two other false or fanciful varieties within Homo sapiens—ferns for
"wild boys" occasionally discovered in the woods and possibly raised
by animals [most turned out to be retarded or mentally ill youngsters
abandoned by their parents]; and monstrosus for travelers' tales of
hairy people with tails, and other assorted fables.)
Linnaeus then presented the four major varieties arranged by
geography and, interestingly, not in the ranked order favored by
most Europeans in the racist tradition. He discussed, in sequence,
Americanos, Europeus, Asiaticus, and Afer (or African). In so doing,
Linnaeus presented nothing at all original, but merely mapped hu-
mans onto the four geographic regions of conventional cartog-
raphy.
In the first line of his descriptions, Linnaeus characterized each
group by three words for color, temperament, and posture in that
order. Again, none of these three categories implies any ranking
by worth. Moreover, Linnaeus again bowed to classical taxonomic
theories rather than his own observations in making these decisions.
For example, his separations by temperament (or "humor") record
the ancient and medieval theory that a persons' mood arises from a
balance of four fluids (humor is Latin for "moisture")—blood,
phlegm, choler (or yellow bile), and melancholy (or black bile). One
of the four substances would dominate, and a person would there-
fore be sanguine (the cheerful realm of blood), phlegmatic (slug-
gish), choleric (prone to anger), or melancholic (sad). Four
geographic regions, four humors, four races.
For the American variety, Linnaeus wrote "rufus, cholericus, rec-
tus" (red, choleric, upright); for the European, "albus, sanguineus,
torosus" (white, sanguine, muscular); for the Asian, "luridus, melan-
cholicus, rigidus" (pale-yellow, melancholy, stiff); and for the African,
"niger, phlegmaticus, laxus" (black, phlegmatic, relaxed).
I don't mean to deny that Linnaeus held conventional beliefs