Prichard, JAMES COWLES

Prichard, JAMES COWLES, ethnologist, was born at Ross in Herefordshire, 11th February 1786. The son of a Quaker merchant, he received a careful home education at Ross and in Bristol, where he had many chances of picking up foreign languages. There, at St Thomas's, London, and in Edinburgh he studied medicine; and in 1810, after a residence both at Cambridge and at Oxford, he commenced practice in Bristol as a physician. His talents were soon recognised. He was appointed physician first to the Clifton dispensary and St Peter's Hospital, and afterwards to the Bristol infirmary. In 1813 appeared his Researches into the Physical History of Mankind, which at once secured him a high standing as an ethnologist. The different editions of this work (4th, 5 vols. 1841-51) gave further proofs of the zeal with which he pursued his ethnological inquiries; and at the same time he devoted himself much to philology, which he rightly judged to be absolutely indispensable for an enlarged study of ethnology. He made himself master not only of the Romance, Teutonic, and Celtic languages, but also of Sanskrit, Hebrew, Arabic; and in The Eastern Origin of the Celtic Nations (1831; 2d ed. by Latham, 1857) he compared the different dialects of Celtic with the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Teutonic languages, and succeeded in establishing a close affinity between them all, from which he argued in favour of a common origin for all the peoples speaking those languages. Besides several medical works, he also published an Analysis of Egyptian Mythology (1819; Ger. trans. by A. W. von Schlegel, 1837) and The Natural History of Man (2 vols. 1843; 4th ed. by E. Norris, 1855). As a tribute to his eminence as an ethnologist, Dr Prichard was elected president of the Ethnological Society; while in recognition of his researches into the nature and various forms of insanity he was appointed in 1845 a commissioner in lunacy. This occasioned his removal to London, where on 22d December 1848 he died of rheumatic fever. The first to raise ethnology to the rank of a science, he was himself a monogenist, maintaining that man is one in species, and that the negro is the primitive type of the human race.