An American polygenesist encountered Darwin’s Origin of Species within months of its publication.

Evidence

In August 1860, polygenesist Josiah C. Nott took some time away from raising Alabama’s first medical school (now in Birmingham). He skimmed through a five-hundred-page tome published the previous November in England. It had a long title, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Nott probably knew the author: the eminent, antislavery British marine biologist Charles Darwin. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 557