Thomas Rowe Edmonds

He was born in Penzance in Cornwall on 20 June 1803, the son of Richard Edmonds who was town clerk of Marazion, and his wife Elizabeth.

[1] Edmonds applied the method of Pehr Wilhelm Wargentin for life tables to England, as Joshua Milne had done with data from Carlisle, Cumberland.

[1] Edmonds wrote a series of 15 papers in The Lancet, from 1836 to 1842, on the topic of mortality and health, the first being "On the laws of collective vitality".

[8] It was from the first paper of the Lancet series that Farr acquired a number of central points that Edmonds was making, in particular about collection of data.

[18] He anticipated Karl Marx in a theory of surplus labour and wages, and in postulating the replacement of capitalism by a later stage, which he called the "social system".

[20] On the other hand, Edmonds was a polygenist believing in immutable human species, and no social Darwinist.

Augustus De Morgan and Thomas Bond Sprague took him to task during the early 1860s, in the Journal of the Institute of Actuaries.

[29] This controversy was later thought to have slowed acceptance of the refinement proposed by William Makeham to the Gompertz model, now the Gompertz–Makeham law of mortality.

[32] Garrett Hardin regarded this book as the first important population theory opposed to that of Robert Malthus.

[18] In arguing against Malthus, Edmonds (in common with Richard Jones, Augustus Henry Moreton and George Rickards) laid weight on factors that could cause postponement of marriage.

Later research by David Heron confirmed Edmonds's findings, which left open the question of urban versus rural fertility.