Latham

Latham, ROBERT GORDON, ethnologist and philologist, was born 24th March 1812, at the vicarage of Billingborough, in Lincolnshire. From Eton he passed in 1829 to King's College, Cambridge, of which in due course he was elected fellow. In 1842 he took the degree of M.D.; but nine years before a tour in Denmark and Norway had led him to direct his attention particularly to Scandinavian philology. From 1842 to 1849 he held appointments in connection with London hospitals; already in 1839 he had been elected professor of the English Language and Literature in University College, London; and in 1852 he became director of the ethnological department of the Crystal Palace. His first work was Norway and the Norwegians (1840), followed by translations from Tegner's Frithiof's Saga. His well-known work, English Language, published in 1841, went through numerous editions. The Natural History of the Varieties of Mankind (1850) was justly accepted as a valuable contribution to ethnology. Among his other works may be mentioned his edition of Tacitus's Germania, with philological and historical notes (1850); Ethnology of the British Colonies (1851); Ethnology of the British Islands (1852); Man and his Migrations (1851); Descriptive Ethnology (1859); The Ethnology of Europe (1852); Native Races of the Russian Empire (1854); a new edition of Johnson's Dictionary (1870); Outlines of General or Developmental Philology (1878). The fact should be specially emphasised that in 1862 Latham entered the field against Lassen, Bopp, Pott, Grimm, and Max Müller, declining to accept the central Asian theory of the 'good Aryan,' and affirming the view, since advanced by Penka, Schrader, Isaac Taylor, and Sayce, that the Aryan race originated in Europe. He suffered for years from aphasia, and died at Putney 9th March 1888. Since 1863 he had been in receipt of a government pension of £100. See the long obituary by T. Watts in the Athenæum for 17th March 1888.