Abstract
Whether implied or stated, the consensus among these historians of religion has been that Methodists[,] ... [having] played down doctrine and all matters of the intellect, were unaffected by the nineteenth-century debates on science and revealed religion that took on an added sense of urgency after the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species.8 It is true that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Methodists had a reputation for being somewhat anti-intellectual-as Mencken's musings make clear.\n In the case of the immense variety of colors and characters that could be found in the human species, though, it was an intense susceptibility to climatic influences, rather than polygenesis, that caused the rapid physiological variability, and this variability, according to the MQR's reviewer, was concomitant with a tendency to abnormal specialties hardly belonging to the human species, except by accident.