Cornelius de Pauw

The Creoles, descending from Europeans and born in America, though educated in the universities of Mexico, of Lima, and College de Santa Fe, have never produced a single book.

This degradation of humanity must be imputed to the vitiated qualities of the air stagnated in their immense forests, and corrupted by noxious vapours from standing waters and uncultivated grounds…Rejecting the existence of the Aztec calendar: It cannot be, because such a practice presupposes a long series of astronomical observations and very precise knowledge for calculating the solar year, which cannot coincide with the prodigious ignorance in which those peoples were submerged.

Dogs, which in Peru are subject to the venereal disease, are not so in the northern regions; hogs, which dwindle in Pennsylvania, in other places lose their shape, but not their stature; in the English colonies, European sheep become smaller, without losing their wool; in the islands, as in Jamaica, they change their wool for a hair hard and coarse, which cannot be manufactured...Pauw's work also dealt with the manners and customs unique to the natives of the Americas, ranging from the Inuit and Canadian Indians in the north to the Peruvians in the south.

He notes: The Tunguses, a people of Siberia, are, like the Canadians, grave, phlegmatic, and speak little; because they have but few ideas, and still fewer words to express them; add to this, that the silence and gloom of their forests naturally induce an habitual melancholy.

Hence it is that they prefer strong and inebriating liquors, which quicken the motion of the blood, and set the machine in action, to the most precious gifts that can be made them.The Tunguses hang their dead on trees, so do the Illinois of America; they cannot dig graves in the earth frozen hard to the depth of twenty feet.

This is obviously nothing more than a coincidence...In a discussion about the physical characteristics of Native Americans, he writes of a peculiar custom among the Caribbeans: There is in the Caribane a sort of savages who have hardly any neck, and whose shoulders rise as high as the ears; this too is factitious, and brought about by laying great weights on the head of the infant, which compress the vertebrae of the neck, and force them to descend into the hollow formed by the two bones of the upper part of the breast.

The Mexican Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavijero, exiled in Bologna, attached a series of "Dissertations" to his Storia antica del Messico with de Pauw "the principal target of my shots."

Some of de Pauw's statements on the poor aspects of the mineral wealth of the Americas were countered by Molina along with his claims about the shorter lives of their inhabitants.