It certainly suggests a dawning focus on the nature of separately developed populations, doesn't it?

Nor is it the white man alone that thus acts the destroyer; the Polynesian of Malay extraction has in parts of the East Indian archipelago, thus driven before him the dark-coloured native. The varieties of man seem to act on each other in the same way as different species of animals -- the stronger always extirpating the weaker.

http://www.literature.org/authors/darwin-charles/the-voyage-of-the-beagle/chapter-19.html