Robert Gordon Latham FRS (24 March 1812 – 9 March 1888) was an English ethnologist and philologist. Early life The eldest son of Thomas Latham, vicar of Billingborough, Lincolnshire, he was born there on 24 March 1812. He entered Eton College in 1819, and in 1829 went on to King's College, Cambridge, where he graduated B.A. in 1832, and was soon afterwards elected a Fellow. Philologist Latham studied philology for a year on the continent, near Hamburg, then in Copenhagen with Rasmus Christian Rask, and finally in Christiania (now Oslo). In Norway he knew Ludvig Kristensen Daa and Henrik Wergeland; he wrote about the country in Norway and the Norwegians (1840). In 1839 he was elected professor of English language and literature in University College, London. Here he associated with Thomas Hewitt Key and Henry Malden, linguists working in the tradition of Friedrich August Rosen. Together they developed the Philological Society, expanding it from a student group to a broad base among London philologists, publishing its own Proceedings. Medical career Latham decided to enter the medical profession, and in 1842 became a licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians; he subsequently obtained the degree of M.D. at the University of London. He became lecturer on forensic medicine and materia medica at the Middlesex Hospital, and in 1844 he was elected assistant-physician there. Ethnologist Latham was more interested, however, in ethnology and philology. In 1849 he abandoned medicine and resigned his appointments. In 1852 he was given the direction of the ethnological department of The Crystal Palace, as it moved to Sydenham. Latham was a follower of James Cowles Prichard, and like Prichard took ethnology to be, in the main, the part of historical philology that traced the origin of races through the genealogical relationships of languages. He frequently lectured in this area. As a baseline he used the three-race theory of Georges Cuvier. Along with Prichard, however, Latham criticised Cuvier's use of the "Caucasian race" concept; and he preferred to avoid the term "race", referring instead to "varieties of man", as a reaction to the rise of polygenist theory around 1850. However, he followed in 1854 by writing The Native Races of the Russian Empire. Latham moved on, though, from Prichard's assumption (now sometimes called "languages and nations"), that the historical relationships of languages matched perfectly the relationships of the groups speaking them. In 1862 he made a prominent protest