Page "Race (human classification)" Paragraph 16

In the last two decades of the 18th century polygenism, the belief that different races had evolved separately in each continent and shared no common ancestor, was advocated in England by historian Edward Long and anatomist Charles White, in Germany by ethnographers Christoph Meiners and Georg Forster, and in France by Julien-Joseph Virey, and prominently in the US by Samuel Morton, Josiah Nott and Louis Agassiz.

Polygenism was popular and most widespread in the 19th century, culminating in the creation of the Anthropological Society of London during the American Civil War, in opposition to the Abolitionist Ethnological Society.