Henri Milne-Edwards was the 27th child of William Edwards, an English planter and colonel of the militia in Jamaica and Elisabeth Vaux, a Frenchwoman.

He was brought up in Paris by his older brother Guillaume Frederic Edwards (1777–1842), a distinguished physiologist and ethnologist.

[1] One of his earliest papers (Recherches anatomiques sur les crustacés), which was presented to the French Academy of Sciences in 1829, formed the theme of an elaborate and eulogistic report by Cuvier in the following year.

It embodied the results of two dredging expeditions undertaken by him and his friend Audouin during 1826 and 1828 in the neighbourhood of Granville, and was remarkable for clearly distinguishing the marine fauna of that portion of the French coast into four zones.

His son, Alphonse Milne-Edwards (1835–1900), who became professor of ornithology at the museum in 1876, devoted himself especially to fossil birds and deep-sea exploration.

An important early classification scheme for vertebrates, diagrammed as a series of nested sets, was illustrated in Milne-Edwards (1844).