This paper draws on material from the dissertation books of the University of Edinburgh's student societies and surviving lecture notes from the university's professors to shed new light on the debates on human variation, heredity and the origin of races between 1790 and 1835. That Edinburgh was the most important centre of medical education in the English-speaking world in this period makes this a particularly significant context. By around 1800 the fixed natural order of the eighteenth century was giving way to a more fluid conception of species and varieties. The dissolution of the 'Great Chain of Being' made interpretations of races as adaptive responses to local climates plausible. The evidence presented shows that human variation, inheritance and adaptation were being widely discussed in Edinburgh in the student circles around Charles Darwin when he was a medical student in Edinburgh in the 1820s. It is therefore no surprise to find these same themes recurring in similar form in the evolutionary speculations in his notebooks on the transmutation of species written in the late 1830s during the gestation of his theory of evolution.

中文翻译：

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达尔文之前的种族：启蒙运动后人类的变异、适应和自然历史 爱丁堡，1790-1835

本文借鉴了爱丁堡大学学生社团的论文书籍和该大学教授留下的讲义，为 1790 年至 1835 年间关于人类变异、遗传和种族起源的辩论提供了新的思路。这一时期英语世界中最重要的医学教育中心使这成为一个特别重要的背景。到 1800 年左右，18 世纪固定的自然秩序正在让位于更加流动的物种和品种概念。“存在大链”的解体使得将种族解释为对当地气候的适应性反应变得合理。提供的证据表明，人类变异，1820 年代，查尔斯·达尔文 (Charles Darwin) 还是爱丁堡的医学生时，他在爱丁堡的学生圈子中广泛讨论了继承和适应问题。因此，在 1830 年代后期在他的进化理论孕育期间所写的关于物种嬗变的笔记本中的进化推测中，发现这些相同的主题以类似的形式反复出现也就不足为奇了。