Career
After training in a missionary house in Basle, he transferred in 1845 to the Church Missionary Society based in London. From 1847 he was in Sierra Leone, where he taught at Fourah Bay College. There he collected a large sample of linguistic material, some of it from freed slaves.
His major work Polyglotta Africana from 1854 began the serious study by European scholars of a large range of African languages.