William Frédéric Edwards
William Frédéric Edwards (1777–1842) was a French physiologist, of Jamaican background, who was also a pioneer anthropologist. He has been called "the father of ethnology in France". He is remembered largely for his principle of the permanency of physical "types." He was also a leader in the new science of "linguistique" and proposed a new branch of comparative philology based on pronunciation. Life He was born in Jamaica to English parents, and was a pupil at New College, Hackney, a contemporary of William Hazlitt. Educated also in Bruges, he worked first in the city library there. He went to Paris in 1808 as a medical student. There he studied under François Magendie, wrote a thesis on the physiology of the eye, and became Magendie's assistant. Edwards was naturalised in France in 1828, and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1829. He belonged to or contributed to a number of French learned societies; in 1832 he was elected to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques and Académie Royale de Médécine. Scientific works Edwards began independent research in 1815–6, working on manganese oxide compounds with Pierre Chevillot. At the same time he began investigations on asphyxia in animals. Edwards