Essentialists and environmentalists

Insofar as it could be said to exist then as a system of knowledge, anthropology in the eighteenth century was a branch of natural history. Natural history fell into two broad divisions. There were those who believed in the reality of species, and there were those who believed that species were merely faint calibrations in an endless process of speciation. Joseph Banks, the English naturalist who accompanied Captain James Cook on his first voyage to the South Pacific, followed the botanist Carolus Linnaeus in believing that a species was forever. He refused to admit the possibility of its extinction: somewhere all plants and creatures had a place, and they would keep it.

The French naturalist, the Comte de Buffon, on the other hand, considered the forms of nature to be changing all the time, owing to factors such as soil, climate, transplantation, and geology. In terms of the myth of the four ages, Banks believed in a golden age, when everything had a settlement and a fixed character, and natural history was conceived as a map rather than a sequence; while, for his part, Buffon believed in an iron age, when time was on the march and everything was in motion, when differences in development were visible indicators of passage, like the divisions on the dial of a clock.