[4] Blumenbach's peers considered him one of the great theorists of his day, and he was a mentor or influence on many of the next generation of German biologists, including Alexander von Humboldt.

thesis De generis humani varietate nativa (On the Natural Variety of Mankind, University of Göttingen, which was first published in 1775, then re-issued with changes to the titlepage in 1776).

[11] Following Georges Cuvier's identification, Blumenbach gave the woolly mammoth its first scientific name, Elephas primigenius (first-born elephant), in 1799.

His reputation was much extended by the publication of his Institutiones Physiologicae (1787), a condensed, well-arranged view of the animal functions, expounded without discussion of minute anatomical details.

This manual, though slighter than the subsequent works of Cuvier, Carus, and others, and not to be compared with such later expositions as that of Gegenbaur, was long esteemed for the accuracy of the author's own observations, and his just appreciation of the labors of his predecessors.

[11] Although the greatest part of Blumenbach's life was passed at Göttingen, in 1789 he visited Switzerland, and gave a curious medical topography of that country in the Bibliothek.

At the time, "primitive" or "primeval" described the ancestral form, while "degeneration" was understood to be the process of change leading to a variety adapted to a new environment by being exposed to a different climate and diet.

Blumenbach claimed that Adam and Eve were Caucasian inhabitants of Asia,[18] and that other races came about by degeneration from environmental factors such as the sun and poor diet.

Thus, he claimed, Negroid pigmentation arose because of the result of the heat of the tropical sun, while the cold wind caused the tawny colour of the Eskimos, and the Chinese were fair skinned compared to the other Asian stocks because they kept mostly in towns protected from environmental factors.

[19] Moreover, he concluded that Africans were not inferior to the rest of mankind "concerning healthy faculties of understanding, excellent natural talents and mental capacities":[20] "Finally, I am of opinion that after all these numerous instances I have brought together of negroes of capacity, it would not be difficult to mention entire well-known provinces of Europe, from out of which you would not easily expect to obtain off-hand such good authors, poets, philosophers, and correspondents of the Paris Academy; and on the other hand, there is no so-called savage nation known under the sun which has so much distinguished itself by such examples of perfectibility and original capacity for scientific culture, and thereby attached itself so closely to the most civilized nations of the earth, as the Negro.

"[21]He did not consider his "degenerative hypothesis" as racist and sharply criticized Christoph Meiners, an early practitioner of scientific racialism, as well as Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring, who concluded from autopsies that Africans were an inferior race.

[23] At his time, Blumenbach was perceived as anti-racist and he strongly opposed the practice of slavery and the belief of the inherent savagery of the coloured races.

[24] Alexander von Humboldt wrote on his and Blumenbach's views: "While we maintain the unity of the human species, we at the same time repel the depressing assumption of superior and inferior races.

[29] Blumenbach shortly afterward wrote a manual of natural history entitled Handbuch der Naturgeschichte; 12 editions and some translations.

His central contribution was in the conception of a vis formativa or Bildungstrieb, an inborn force within an organism that led it to create, maintain, and repair its shape.

"[32] While Wolff was not concerned to name this vital organising, reproducing power, in 1780 Blumenbach posited a formative drive (nisus formativus or Bildungstrieb) responsible for biological "procreation, nourishment, and reproduction", as well as self-development and self-perfection on a cultural level.

[33] Blumenbach held that all living organisms "from man down to maggots, and from the cedar to common mould or mucor", possess an inherent "effort or tendency which, while life continues, is active and operative; in the first instance to attain the definite form of the species, then to preserve it entire, and, when it is infringed upon, so far as this is possible, to restore it."

"[32] At the same time, befitting the central idea of the science and medicine of dynamic polarity, it was also the physiological functional identity of what theorists of society or mind called "aspiration".

Blumenbach's Bildungstrieb found quick passage into evolutionary theorizing of the decade following its formulation and in the thinking of the German natural philosophers.

Blumenbach continued to refine the concept in his De nisu formativo et generationis negotio ('On the Formative Drive and the Operation of Generation', 1787) and in the second edition (1788) of the Handbuch der Naturgeschichte: 'it is a proper force (eigentliche Kraft), whose undeniable existence and extensive effects are apparent throughout the whole of nature and revealed by experience'.

The way in which the Bildungstrieb differed, perhaps, from other such forces was in its comprehensive architectonic character: it directed the formation of anatomical structures and the operations of physiological processes of the organism so that various parts would come into existence and function interactively to achieve the ends of the species.