polygenousadj.

1799 R. Kirwan Geol. Ess. 164 Some are unigenous, consisting for the greater part, at least, of one species of stone or aggregate; some polygenous, consisting of various species, alternating with, or passing into, or mixed with each other.

1799 R. Kirwan Geol. Ess. 226 Secondary mountains are either formed of one species of stone, or of strata of different species,..the former I call unigenous, the latter polygenous: these are commonly stratified, the former often not.

1860 Reader 15 Sept. 796 Thus domestic pigeons may be said to be ‘monogenous’ as to their origin from one wild species, ‘polygenous’ as to the individual ancestor of each variety.

1997 M. Wolpoff & R. Caspari Race & Human Evol. iv. 96 While it may appear that the recognition of common descent for all species was incompatible with polygenous ideology, polygenism did not die.

1870 F. Hurter in Eng. Mech. 11 Feb. 524/1 Chlorine forms only one compound with hydrogen, whilst oxygen and carbon form several compounds with that element. Chlorine may, for this reason, be called a monogenous element: the others..polygenous elements.

1939 R. B. McKerrow Prolegomena for Oxf. Shakespeare i. 13 It would, I think, be convenient if we could use some such words as ‘monogenous’ and ‘polygenous’ to designate the two groupings of texts which I have described above: ‘monogenous’ standing for those which derive from a single extant edition and ‘polygenous’ for those which have at their head two or more extant editions none of which derives from another.

1955 F. Bowers Editing Shakespeare iii. 90 Editors, especially of Hamlet, have been generally inclined to operate according to the polygenous text method.

1988 P. Brett in N. Kenyon Authenticity & Early Music iv. 103 In the Shakespearean field..the problems were in some ways analogous to those encountered by the founding fathers, but in others (for instance the preponderance of bibliographical over scribal contexts and of ‘monogenous’ stemmatic patterns over ‘polygenous’ ones) quite different.

1871 J. R. Brodhead Hist. State N.Y. II. viii. 387 The most polygenous of all the British dependencies in North America.

1932 Mod. Lang. Jrnl. 16 357 A polygenous system of diverse standards, methods, and instructional objectives.

1961 S. K. De Early Hist. Vaisnava Faith & Movement Bengal (ed. 2) 1 Bengal Vaiṣṇavism appears..as a fairly homogenous result, but in reality it is a complex product. Its tradition is not only multiple but also polygenous.

1990 Jrnl. Southern Hist. 56 725 This polygenous entity, so arbitrarily defined in terms of space and time, is labeled a single thing—‘America’—and explored as a single culture.