[5] According to Montague Rhodes James, Richard Okes, Provost before Leigh, brought to all college meetings a piece of paper with a reprimand of the Visitor to Bendyshe, in case he ever attended, for a "profane letter he had sent to the Dean.
[7] This was at the period, during the American Civil War, during which Thomas Henry Huxley and John Lubbock, in the Darwinian evolutionary camp, were using the long-established Ethnological Society to attack this new rival, described by Desmond as "ultra-racist".
[10][11][12] The purchase was made in August: in the previous month Bendyshe had voted in Westminster for the Liberal John Stuart Mill, leading (this was an open ballot) to his expulsion from the Conservative Club.
He also offended in a review Robert Gordon Latham, author of The Natural History of Varieties of Men, associated with the Ethnological Society.
[21] Blumenbach, noted for his theory of racial classification, began with the rejection of polygenist and chain of being views of race, regarding environmental forces as key; but later cited a nisus formativus (de:Bildungstrieb) tracing back to Immanuel Kant's vitalism of 1773.
[22] Bendyshe disagreed with the interpretation of Flourens, that Blumenbach was a monogenist, calling that view a "singular mistake" in terms of the "unity of the human genus".
In particular he states that an article by Stephen Jay Gould, proposing that Blumenbach's work on race was undermined by aesthetic views, is flawed in ways including the use made of Bendyshe's edition.
[7] For the Memoirs he also translated the 1721 dissertation Dissertatio critica de hominibus orbis nostri incolis specie et ortu by Vincentius Rumpf (which has been incorrectly attributed to Johann Albert Fabricius).
[26] His view on the Aboriginal Australians was that their population decline was caused by "promiscuous intercourse, artificial abortion, infanticide, wars, diseases, and poverty".
[27] According to Adrian Desmond, Bendyshe, Hunt and James McGrigor Allan were major proponents of the views of the polygenist Carl Vogt.