Over three decades the ESL had a chequered existence, with periods of low activity and a major schism contributing to a patchy continuity of its meetings and publications.
It provided a forum for discussion of what would now be classed as pioneering scientific anthropology from the changing perspectives of the period, though also with wider geographical, archaeological and linguistic interests.
[8] Prichard commented in 1848 that the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) still classed ethnology as a subdivision of natural history, as applied to man.
[11] Around 1860 the discovery of human antiquity and the publication of the Origin of Species caused a fundamental change of perspective, with the older historical approach looking hopeless given the emergence of prehistory, but the biological issue gaining in interest.
[12] The Aborigines' Protection Society (APS) was set up as a result of parliamentary committee activity, and was largely the initiative of Thomas Fowell Buxton.
It produced reports, but in the wake of the Niger expedition of 1841 some of its supporters believed a case made on science was being sidelined in the activities of the APS.
An ethnological questionnaire was produced by the BAAS in 1841, arising from a committee led by Thomas Hodgkin of the APS, and drawing on prior work in Paris by W. F.
[15] The Society first met in February 1843 at Hodgkin's house;[16] or on 31 January, when Ernst Dieffenbach read a paper On the Study of Ethnology.
Links to the Aborigines' Protection Society were retained through the common membership of Hodgkin and Henry Christy, though the break was not completely amicable.
[33] Thomas Richard Heywood Thomson delivered a paper in 1854 to the Society on interfertility, casting doubt on comments of Paweł Edmund Strzelecki about female infertility among Aboriginal Australians after they had given birth to a child with a white father.
[35] He found an ally in John Crawfurd, who had retired from service as colonial diplomat and administrator for the East India Company.
In 1868 the Society set up a Classification Committee to try to get on top of the issues caused by haphazard reporting, and lack of systematic fieldwork.
[42] In the years after the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859, the "Ethnologicals" generally supported Charles Darwin against his critics, and rejected the more extreme forms of scientific racism.
[44] On the topic of race, the Ethnological Society retained views descending from Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who had a five-race theory but was a monogenist, and from Prichard.
A small group of past supporters of Hunt broke away in 1873, forming a London Anthropological Society that lasted two years.