Milne-Edwards, HENRI, naturalist, was born at Bruges, 23d October 1800. His father was an Englishman. Milne-Edwards studied medicine at Paris, where he took his degree of M.D. in 1823, but devoted himself to natural history. After having for many years taught natural history at the Collège de Henri IV., he was elected in 1838 member of the Académie des Sciences in the place of Cuvier. In 1841 he filled the chair of Entomology at the Jardin des Plantes, and in 1844 became also professor of Zoology and Physiology. He was a member of the Académie de Médecine, and of most of the learned academies of Europe and America, and held several orders—amongst others, since 1861, that of Commander of the Legion of Honour. He published numerous original memoirs of importance in the Annales des Sciences Naturelles, a journal he himself assisted in editing for fifty years. His Éléments de Zoologie (1834), when reissued in 1851 as Cours Élémentaire de Zoologie, had an enormous circulation at home and abroad, and long formed the basis of most minor manuals of zoology published in Europe. His Histoire Naturelle des Crustacés (1834-40) and Histoire Naturelle des Coralliaires (1857-60) were almost equally noteworthy. The Lectures on the
Physiology and Comparative Anatomy of Man and the Animals (14 vols. 1857-81) have a great permanent value for their immense mass of details, and copious references to scattered sources of information. He also had an important share in a splendid quarto of Anatomical and Zoological Researches on the Coasts of Sicily. Other works were researches on the natural history of the French coasts (1832-45) and on the natural history of the mammalia (1871). In some of his later works he was assisted by his distinguished son Alphonse. Milne-Edwards must always hold high rank amongst the naturalists of the 19th century. His researches in the distribution of the lower invertebrates led him to the theory of centres of creation; and to this he adhered throughout life, in spite of the general acceptance of the newer and larger views of Darwin by his fellow-scientists. He died on the 29th July 1885. His elder brother, Frederick William, was almost equally celebrated. He founded the Ethnological Society in Paris, and is considered the father of ethnology in France.