ABSTRACT
When Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, published Observations on Experimental Philosophy in 1666, she became the first British woman to write and publish scientific work.1 Perhaps eager to demonstrate her knowledge of the newest scientific theories, Cavendish added a new section to the second edition of Observations in 1668, a section that responded, as Rosemary Kegl remarks, to current debates about racial origin, and in particular to the question of whether white and black men were descended from the same human ancestor-Adam.2 In the 1668 text, Cavendish argues that black men are not descended from Adam: “Blackmoors [are] a kind or race of men different from the White . . . For, if there were no differences in their productions, then would not onely all men be exactly like, but all Beasts also; that is, there would be no difference between a Horse and a Cow, a Cow and a Lyon, a Snake and an Oyster.”3 The differences between white and black men are as pronounced as those between “a Horse and a Cow, and Cow and a Lyon.” This statement appears to collapse two different senses of the word “race”: species difference (like that between a “Horse and a Cow”) and color difference. Equating species and color difference, Cavendish concludes that the “Blackmoors” are as different from “White” people as cows are from lions. But, as Kegl brilliantly observes, Cavendishs romantic utopia, The Description o f a New World, Called the Blazing World, which was bound and published together with Observations, carefully distinguishes between race, meaning species difference, and race, meaning variants of skin-tone:
the ordinary sort of men [in the Blazing World] . . . were of several complexions: not white, black, tawny, olive or ash-coloured; but some appeared of an azure, some of a deep purple, some of a grass-green, some of a scarlet, some of an orange-colour, etc. .. . The rest of the inhabitants of that world, were men of several different sorts, shapes, figures, disposition, and humours . . . some were
bear-men, some worm-men, some fish-or mear-men [mer-men], . . . some bird-men, some fly-men, some ant-men, some geese-men, some spider-men, some lice-men, some fox-men, some ape-men, some jackdaw-men, some magpie-men, some parrot-men, some satyrs, some giants, and many more, which I cannot all remember.4
