[Robert Gordon]. English philologist and ethnologist, born at Billingsborough, Lincolnshire, on the 24th of March 1812. He was educated at Eton and Cambridge, studied medicine and became assistant physician in the Middlesex Hospital. Then he traveled in Norway and studied the Scandinavian idioms. In 1841 he was made professor of English literature in University College, London. He published numerous works on philology and ethnology; among them, Norway and the Norwegians (1840); Treatise on the English Language (1841); Natural History of the Varieties of Man (1850); Man and His Migrations (1851); Descriptive Ethnology (1851); The Nationalities of Europe (1863); and a series of English grammars. Mr. Latham was the originator of the theory that the first home of the Aryan race was in Europe, not Asia. He died on the 9th of March 1888.
