Henri Milne-Edwards

Henri Milne-Edwards was a French zoologist, born on 23 October 1800 in Bruges, in present-day Belgium, the 27th child of William Edwards, an English planter and colonel of the militia in Jamaica, and Elisabeth Vaux, a Frenchwoman. He spent most of his life in France and was brought up in Paris by his older brother Guillaume Frederic Edwards, a distinguished physiologist and ethnologist. He first turned his attention to medicine and graduated as an MD at Paris in 1823, but his passion for natural history prevailed and he gave himself up to the study of the lower forms of animal life. He became a student of Georges Cuvier and befriended Jean Victoire Audouin. The Royal Society awarded him the Copley Medal in 1856 and elected him a foreign member in 1842, and his son Alphonse Milne-Edwards also became a biologist.