This chapter examines Blumenbach’s writing on the varieties of the human race in the context of the Blumenbach-Kant debate around 1790 concerning the idea of the formative drive. This examination primarily involves demonstrating how the concept of “dégénération” is linked to a new understanding of natural history in terms of the historicisation of nature. The historicisation of nature is linked to a late eighteenth century subversion of the classical idea of the “chain of beings,” which dissolves, as it were, within the framework of a temporal axis and thus becomes temporalised. The natural history of the Enlightenment is discussed with regard to Blumenbach as follows: (1) dégénération as a theory of migration and progress; (2) the naturalisation of “man” and the notion of the “ignoble savage”; (3) the notion of the formative drive and a new archaeology of the globe; (4) the formative drive and dégénération; (5) geographical history and the comparison of human faces and skulls; and (6) Varietas Americana. The central goal is the inclusion of Blumenbach’s natural history into the natural law tradition of the Enlightenment.