Henri Milne-Edwards was a French zoologist. He was a professor of hygiene and natural history at the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures and later dean of the Faculty of Sciences in Paris.
Background
Henri Milne-Edwards was born on October 23, 1800, in Bruges, West-Vlaanderen, Belgium (then Bruges, French First Republic) where his parents had retired to the family of William Edwards, an English planter and militia colonel in Jamaica, and Elisabeth Vaux, Milne-Edwards. He was his father's 27th child. Milne, which he added to his father’s name, was the married name of his godmother and half-sister by a previous marriage of his father. His father was jailed for several years for helping some Englishmen in their escape to their country. As a child, he was taken to Paris by his older brother, William Frédéric Edwards who took care of him. The fall of Napoleon led to the release of their father and the reunification of the family in Paris. When Belgium became independent, Milne-Edwards chose French citizenship.
Education
Milne-Edwards studied medicine at the University of Paris and graduated as a Doctor of Medicine in 1823. His passion for natural history soon prevailed, and he gave himself up to the study of the lower forms of animal life. He became a student of Georges Cuvier.
After medical studies in Paris, Milne-Edwards acquired a solid background in zoology and in 1832 accepted a post as professor of hygiene and natural history at the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures. Despite his delicate health, in addition to his teaching, he undertook a vast program of research on the invertebrates. In 1941 he was appointed to the chair of entomology of the Museum of Natural History, where he had long had a laboratory. At the time the holder of this chair was responsible for the crustaceans, the myriapods, and the arachnids as well as the insects. Twenty years later the chair of mammalogy became vacant on the death of Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and Milne-Edwards was transferred to it at his own request. In the meantime, he had been named professor, and then dean, of the Faculty of Sciences.
In contrast with the tendencies of his contemporaries, Milne-Edwards had been attracted since his youth to the study of the invertebrates, especially those inhabiting the coastal regions. With his friends from the Museum and later with his students, he organized scientific excursions along the shores of the English Channel. Not content with collecting and classifying the animals, he insisted on examining them in their habitat and observed their behavior, their movements, their localization according to the level of the tides, and their modes of obtaining food and of reproducing. Milne-Edwards recorded a wealth of observations in which physiological data were joined with data from comparative morphology. This method, essentially that of ecology, appeared to afford a novel approach to the marine invertebrates, although it was inspired by one that Georges Cuvier had applied to other groups. It led Milne-Edwards to brilliant discoveries and started the creation of maritime laboratories in France and abroad.
Milne-Edwards’ first investigations were primarily concerned with crustaceans. He published a series of memoirs on most of their systems, including circulation, respiration, nerve, and muscle. He began this work with his friend Jean Audouin, who preceded him in the chair of entomology at the Museum, and who accompanied him on his expeditions to the Chausey Isles; he then continued it alone.
These anatomicophysiological investigations served as the basis for the comprehensive three-volume synthesis to which Milne-Edwards dedicated many years - the classic Histoire naturelle des crustacés (1834-1840). In this work he developed some highly original ideas. He reported that the Crustaceae are made up of some twenty homologous metameric segments, the “zoonites,” which are variously fashioned according to the functions they fulfill and the mode of life (free, fixed, or parasitic) of the species. The variety of possible natural combinations, within the limits of a basic framework, is thus virtually infinite. Among Milne-Edwards’ other works are Histoire naturelle des coralliaires (1858-1860), Monographie des polypes des terrains paléozoïques, and the two-volume Recherches pour servir á l’histoire des mammifères (1868-1874).
As an adjunct to his teaching duties at the Faculty of Sciences Milne-Edwards gathered his lectures into a fourteen-volume publication, Leçons sur la physiologie et l’anatomie comparée de l’homme et des animaux, the composition of which was spread over more than twenty years (1857-1881). At the same time he provided a valuable development of his ideas on the animal organization in Introduction a la zoologie générale, ou considérations sur les tendances de la nature dans la constitution du règne animal (1858). In this book, Milne-Edwards set forth his principal discoveries. These concern the variations that obtain between animal groups, variations which in the final analysis display a great fundamental principle, the law of the division of labor within organisms. Milne-Edwards suspected the existence of this law with his first studies of crustaceans, and he verified it subsequently among the other groups. In the lower animals, the same tissue can adapt to different functions. He observed this phenomenon, for example, in the coelenterates, where a single fragment was seen to be capable of regenerating the entire animal. But in animals of higher zoological order, this ability tends to disappear and is progressively replaced by a specialization of the tissues. Systems, or groups of related organs, become individualized in order to carry out precise and exclusive functions: a digestive system, a respiratory system, a reproductive system, and so on.
Though Milne Edwards' views were rather positivistic he never completely rejected the idea of creationism.
Politics
Milne Edwards wasn't involved in politics and left no remarks that could express his political views.
Views
Henri Milne Edwards had been respectful but essentially hostile to Darwin's theory when he treated the Origin with disparaging brevity in 1867: although like Flourens, he accepted a variability capable of producing changes within a given species, he saw no reason to believe that this was sufficient to yield new species.
Membership
Henri Milne-Edwards was a member of the Royal Society, the Philomatic Society of Paris, the Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the French Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences, the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the Academy of Sciences of Turin, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences.
Royal Society
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United Kingdom
Academy of Sciences Leopoldina
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Prussia
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
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Sweden
French Academy of Sciences
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France
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
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United States
Hungarian Academy of Sciences
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Austria-Hungary
Russian Academy of Sciences
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Russia
Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences
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Prussia
Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities
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Bavaria
Academy of Sciences of Turin
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Italy
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
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Netherlands
National Academy of Sciences
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United States
Philomatic Society of Paris
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France
Personality
Henri Milne-Edwards's work and personality helped him to make a lot of friends in scientific society.
Connections
Henri Milne-Edwards married Laura Trézel. They had nine children, including the biologist Alphonse Milne-Edwards.