The Bristol doctor James Cowles Prichard (1786-1848) has enjoyed a glowing reputation. Late Victorians regarded him as the founder of British anthropology and, in the twentieth century, he has been considered as a precursor of Darwin. Nowadays his name is cited mainly in context of inquiries into the rise of racial theories. Prichard's own theoretical goal was simple: the son of Quaker parents, he attempted to establish that the Bible provided a correct account of the earliest history of humankind; above all it was his aim to prove once and for all the doctrine of monogenesis: the unitary...