in “the happiest and the most lasting epoch” of human history, before the corruption of civil society degenerated the species again in a developmental stage-process. In the late 18th century, the Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794) listed ten stages, or "epochs", each advancing the rights of man and perfecting the human race. Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), Charles Darwin's grandfather, was an enormously influential natural philosopher, physiologist and poet whose remarkably insightful ideas included a statement of transformism and the interconnectedness of all forms of life. His works, which are enormously wide-ranging, also advance a theory of cultural transformation: his famous The Temple of Nature is subtitled ‘the Origin of Society’. This work, rather than proposing in detail a strict transformation of humanity between different stages, instead dwells on Erasmus Darwin's evolutionary mechanism: Erasmus Darwin does not explain each stage one-by-one, trusting his theory of universal organic development, as articulated in the Zoonomia, to illustrate cultural development as well. Erasmus Darwin therefore flits with abandon through his chronology: Priestman notes that it jumps from the emergence of life onto land, the development of opposable thumbs, and the origin of sexual reproduction directly to modern historical events. Another more complex theorist was Richard Payne Knight (1751-1824), an influential amateur archeologist and universal theologian. Knight's The Progress of Civil Society: A Didactic Poem in Six Books (1796) fits precisely into the tradition of triumphant historical stages, beginning with Lucretius and reaching Adam Smith––but just for the first four books. In his final books, Knight then grapples with the French revolution and wealthy decadence. Confronted with these twin issues, Knight's theory ascribes progress to conflict: ‘partial discord lends its aid, to tie the complex knots of general harmony’. Competition in Knight's mechanism spurs development from any one stage to the next: the dialectic of class, land and gender creates growth. Thus, Knight conceptualised a theory of history founded in inevitable racial conflict, with Greece representing ‘freedom’ and Egypt ‘cold inactive stupor’. Buffon, Linnaeus, Camper and Monboddo variously forward diverse arguments about racial hierarchy, grounded in early theories of species change––though many thought that environmental changes could create dramatic changes in form without permanently altering the species or causing species transformation. However, their arguments still bear on race: Rousseau, Buffon and Monboddo cite orangutans as evidence of an earlier prelinguistic human type, and Monboddo even insisted Orangutans and certain African and South Asian races were identical. Other