François Bernier, Carolus Linnaeus and Blumenbach had examined multiple observable human characteristics in search of a typology.

By adding the brown race, which he called " Malay " for Polynesians, Melanesians of Pacific Islands, and aborigines of Australia, Linnaeus ' protégé, anthropology founder Johann Friedrich Blumenbach ( 1752 – 1840 ), came up with the five color typology for humans: white people ( the Caucasian or white race ), more or less black people ( the Ethiopian or black race ), yellow people ( the Mongolian or yellow race ), cinnamon-brown or flame colored people ( the American or red race ) and brown people ( the Malay or brown race ).

The species name troglodytes, Greek for " cave-dweller ", was coined by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in his book De generis humani varietate nativa liber (" on the natural varieties of the human genus ") published in 1776, This book was based on his dissertation presented one year before ( it had a date 16 Sep 1775 printed on its title page ) to the University of Göttingen for internal use only, thus the dissertation did not meet the conditions for published work in the sense of zoological nomenclature.

On the topic of race, the Ethnological Society retained views descending from Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who had a five-race theory but was a monogenist, and from Prichard.

Regarding human origins, Blumenbach believed the first humans had originated in Asia, ( see Asia hypothesis ).

However, the Commission did not know that Blumenbach had already mentioned this name in his dissertation.

In the sense that Newton had left the origin of the attraction of gravitation unexplained, so Blumenbach claimed that " just in the same way as we use the name of attraction or gravity to denote certain forces, the causes of which however still remain hid, as they say, in Cimmerian darkness, the formative force ( nisus formativus ) can explain the generation of animals.

However, whereas Kant had a heuristic concept in mind, to explain mechanical causes, Blumenbach conceived of a cause fully resident in nature.

Blumenbach had initially been an advocate of Haller's view, in contrast to those of Wolff, that the essential elements fo the embryo were already in the egg, he later sided with Wolff.

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach established epigenesis as the model of thought in the life sciences in 1781 with his publication of Über den Bildungstrieb und das Zeugungsgeschäfte.

Blumenbach cut up freshwater polyps and established that the removed parts would regenerate.

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach published the replacement name Ornithorhynchus in 1800.

The troglodytes name was used for the chimpanzee by Blumenbach in 1775 but moved to the genus Simia.

In his dissertation Blumenbach mentioned a name Simia troglodytes with a short description for the Common Chimpanzee.

In Opinion 1368 the ICZN Commission decided in 1985 that Blumenbach's view should be followed, and that his Simia troglodytes as published by Blumenbach in 1779 shall be the type species of the genus Pan and, since it was the oldest available name for the Common Chimpanzee, be used for this species.

While Wolff was not concerned to name this vital organising, reproducing power, Wolff's successor at the Göttingen school of physiology, Blumenbach, posited an explicitly formative drive ( nisus formativus or Bildungstrieb ) as part of the vital power more generally, but one that was responsible for " procreation, nourishment, and reproduction " distinguishing it from Wolff's essential power, which dealt only with nutrition ( sustenance ).

Marked for a political career, he studied finance for six months at the University of Frankfurt ( Oder ); a year later, on April 25, 1789, he matriculated at Göttingen, then known for the lectures of C. G. Heyne and J. F. Blumenbach.

Blumenbach claimed that Adam and Eve were Caucasian ( Georgian ) and that other races came about by degeneration from environmental factors such as the sun and poor dieting — for instance, he claimed Negroid pigmentation arose because of the result of the heat of the tropical sun, while the cold wind caused the tawny colour of the Eskimos, and the Chinese were fair skinned compared to the other Asian stocks because they kept mostly in towns protected from environmental factors.

Though Blumenbach left no overt indications of sources for his theory of biological revolution, his ideas harmonize with those of Bonnet and especially with those of his contemporary Johann Gottfried Herder ( 1744 – 1803 ), and it was Herder whose ideas were influenced by Blumenbach.

Blumenbach provided evidence for the actual existence of this formative force, to distinguish it from other, merely nominal terms.

However, in 1795, a colleague of Meiners from the University of Göttingen, Blumenbach, one of the earliest anthropologists, adopted the term Varietas Caucasia (" Caucasian Variety "), for a new major hypothetical racial division.

Blumenbach named it after the Caucasian peoples ( from the Southern Caucasus region ), whom he considered to be the archetype for the grouping.

Alongside the anthropologist Georges Cuvier, Blumenbach classified the Caucasian race by cranial measurements and bone morphology rather than prioritizing skin pigmentation, and thus considered more than just the palest Europeans (" white, cheeks rosy ") as archetypes for the Caucasian race.

Blumenbach was one of the first scientists to understand the identities of the different species of primates, which were, excluding humans, orangutans and chimpanzees ( gorillas were not known to Europeans at this time ).

Accordingly, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in the first edition of his Manual of Natural History ( 1779 ), proposed that the primates be divided into the Quadrumana ( four-handed, i. e. apes and monkeys ) and Bimana ( two-handed, i. e. humans ).

Blumenbach divided the human species into five races in 1779, later founded on crania research ( description of human skulls ), and called them ( 1793 / 1795 ):

Blumenbach excluded peoples of Southeast Asian islands and Pacific Islanders from his definition in 1779, as he considered them to be part of the Malay race.

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach divided the human species into five races in 1779, later founded on crania research ( description of human skulls ), and called them ( 1793 / 1795 ):

Blumenbach excluded peoples of Southeast Asian islands and Pacific Islanders from his definition in 1779, as he considered them to be part of the Malay race.

Blumenbach did not consider his " degeneration theory " as racist and sharply criticized Christoph Meiners, an early practitioner of scientific racialism as well as Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring who concluded from autopsies that Africans were an inferior race.

In 1809 Cuvier published a somewhat longer description, naming the animal, in which he refuted a hypothesis by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach that it would have been a shore bird.

Long experimentation on muscular irritability, then recently discovered by Luigi Galvani, were contained in his Versuche über die gereizte Muskel-und Nervenfaser ( Berlin, 1797 ) ( Experiments on the Frayed Muscle and Nerve Fibres ), enriched in the French translation with notes by Blumenbach.

At Göttingen he studied Plato with Arnold Heeren ; history with Heeren and Gottlieb Jakob Planck ; Arabic, Hebrew, New Testament Greek and scripture interpretation with Albert Eichhorn ; natural science with Johann Friedrich Blumenbach ; German literature with Georg Friedrich Benecke ; French and Italian literature with Artaud and Bunsen ; and classics with Georg Ludolf Dissen.

After studying in Leipzig and at the University of Göttingen he visited England in the summer of 1806, carrying a letter of introduction from the naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach to Sir Joseph Banks, who, with the other members of the African Association, accepted his offer in 1809 to launch an expedition to discover the source of the River Niger.

: The greater number of naturalists who have taken into consideration the whole structure of man, including his mental faculties, have followed Blumenbach and Cuvier, and have placed man in a separate Order, under the title of the Bimana, and therefore on an equality with the orders of the Quadrumana, Carnivora, etc.

The earliest anthropologists, such as Blumenbach however came to recognize that skin pigmentation within European populations differed, without explaining it with the obsolete idea of admixture with another race.

Born at the end of the European Enlightenment, Maximilian became friends with two of its major figures: Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a major comparative anthropologist under whom he studied biological sciences, and Alexander von Humboldt, who served as Maximilian's mentor.

By the early nineteenth century, Circassians were associated with theories of racial hierarchy, which elevated the Caucasus region as the source of the purest examples of the " white race ", which was named the Caucasian race after the area by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach.

He occupied himself with the cabinet of skulls in the Göttingen museum collected by Blumenbach and with the excavation of prehistoric remains, corresponded actively with the anthropological societies of Paris and London, and organized, in co-operation with the veteran Karl Ernst von Baer, a successful congress of anthropologists at Göttinger in 1861.

Blumenbach owned the greatest contemporary collection of human skulls, 245 whole skulls and fragments and two mummies.

According to Blumenbach, there are five races, all belonging to a single species: Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, and Malay.

According to Blumenbach there are five races all belonging to a single species: Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American and Malay.