James Cowles Prichard

James Cowles Prichard FRS (11 February 1786 – 23 December 1848) was a British physician and ethnologist with broad interests in physical anthropology and psychiatry.

Within a few years of his birth in Ross, Prichard's parents moved to Bristol, where his father now worked in the Quaker ironworks of Harford, Partridge and Cowles.

As a child Prichard was educated mainly at home by tutors and his father, in a range of subjects, including modern languages and general literature.

Therefore, he started on apprenticeships that led to the ranks of apothecaries and surgeons, first studying under the Quaker obstetrician Dr Thomas Pole of Bristol.

at Edinburgh, his doctoral thesis of 1808 being his first attempt at the great question of his life: the origin of human varieties and races.

[4] Later, he read for a year at Trinity College, Cambridge,[5] after which came a significant personal event: he left the Society of Friends to join the established Church of England.

[9] The central conclusion of the work is the unity of the human species, which has been acted upon by causes which have since divided it into permanent varieties or races.

All tackled the question of variation and race in humans; all agreed that these differences were heritable, but only Wells approached the idea of natural selection as a cause.

Science historian Conway Zirkle has described Prichard as an evolutionary thinker who came very close "to explaining the origin of new forms through the operation of natural selection although he never actually stated the proposition in so many words.

"[10] Prichard indicated Africa (indirectly) as the place of human origin, in this summary passage: This opinion was omitted in later editions.

An essay by Adolphe Pictet, which made its author's reputation, was published independently of the earlier investigations of Prichard.