Latham, Robert Gordon, ethnologist and philologist, born at Billingborough Vicarage, Lincolnshire, graduated at Cambridge 1832. and became Fellow of King's College; qualifying in medicine he held appointments in the London hospitals, but meanwhile was attracted to philology and ethnology, appointed professor of English Language and Literature in University College, London, 1839, and director of the ethnological department of the Crystal Palace, 1852; in 1862 he affirmed, against the most weighty authorities, that the Aryan stock is originally European, not Asian, a view which has since found favour; he published his “English Language” in 1841, and “The Natural History of the Varieties of Mankind” in 1850, and was pensioned in 1863 (1812‒1888).
Definition taken from The Nuttall Encyclopædia, edited by the Reverend James Wood (1907)
Lateran * Latimer, Hugh