Voyage de découvertes aux terres australes : exécuté par ordre de Sa Majesté l'empereur et roi, sur les corvettes le Géographe, le Naturaliste, et la goëlette le Casuarina, pendent les années 1800, 1801, 1802, 1803 et 1804; [Historique] publié par decret impérial, sous le ministère de M. de Champagny et rédigé par M. F. Péron ...

Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race 1750-1940

“…60 However, the sheer fact of presence in the field was no longer sufficient in itself. Wallace (1880b:153) would later damn d'Albertis with faint praise in a review of the Italian's account of his New Guinea expeditions.…”

“…59 See, for example, the manner in which Earl (1849-50:686) underwrote his authority as observer: 'The process by which these cicatrices are produced and which I have had the opportunities of watching in their progress from day to day …'. 60 Wallace[1856-61]: entry 63. Despite the legibility of Wallace's handwriting, there is little agreement amongst published transcripts of his journals (see, e.g., the different version of this section as rendered by McKinney 1972:88).…”

“…See especially Stocking 1987:240-5.'breeding out the colour' also admitted that one of the greatest obstacles to this policy was 'colour prejudice' and that during the interwar years prejudice against half-castes was increasing. 60 Such views, though they typically accompanied support for a white Australia, could obstruct this particular process as a means for achieving it. On the other hand, some proponents of racial mixing, like Griffith Taylor, remained unconvinced that a white Australia was possible (Anderson 2002:165-68).…”

“…59 In a much later elaboration of his thesis, Virey (1824, II:30) restricted 'permanence' in the face of external influences to specific characteristics and reconfigured races as merely 'variable modifications of a single, primordial species'. 60 The 'indelible perseverance of the physical and moral character of the negro' thereby justified Virey's division of the human genus into 'two distinct species', each comprising 'several principal races or stocks'. The species were unnamed but clearly ranked on the basis of markedly divergent facial angles and highly essentialized sets of opposed physical and moral traits, starting with skin colour.…”

“…59 This constraint vanished later in the text when he made a zoological argument for 'the absolute difference of the races' in Van Diemen's Land and New Holland and added a footnote promising subsequent proof that the former 'differ essentially from all other known peoples'. 60 The phrase arguably implies discrete autochthonous origin, a radical but by no means unthinkable concept for the time given recent publication of the polygenist treatises of the English surgeon and anatomist Charles White (1728-1813) and the French military physician Julien-Joseph Virey (1775-1846). 61 Péron went on to challenge climatic explanations for human variation: the darker skin colour and 'frizzy' rather than 'straight' hair of the Van Diemen's Landers -'singular anomalies' given the much colder conditions in which they lived -proved 'the imperfection of our systems on the communications of peoples, their transmigrations, and the influence of climate on man'.…”