Four later members of the Edwards family have also been famous. Sir Bryan Edwards, chief justice of Jamaica, died in December 1876. Dr. William Frédéric Edwards, who was born in Jamaica in 1776, was the son of a rich English planter—William Edwards by name (a cousin of Bryan)—who afterwards settled at Bruges, where the younger William was educated. In early life he became a Frenchman, and won for himself much fame as a physiologist, dying at Versailles in 1842. William’s younger brother, Henri Milne Edwards (born at Bruges in 1800 and died in 1885), the zoologist, and Henri’s son, Alphonse Milne Edwards (born in Paris in 1835 and died in 1900), successively held the post of professor of zoology at the Jardin des Plantes, Paris. In 1793 Bryan Edwards published in London, in two quarto volumes, “The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies,” with plates and maps, which has remained the standard work on its subject—the history of the British West Indies till the close of the last century—till to-day. A third volume was added in 1801. He evidently took much pains to collect all the trustworthy information available, especially about current affairs. But he wrote more as a politician than as an historian, and the chief value of the work lies in the large amount of light it throws on the condition of affairs in the West Indies at his time. The arrangement, it must be admitted, leaves a good deal to be desired; and it partakes rather of a collection of essays and articles than of a connected history, and is sadly in need of editing; but the nature of the subject makes it difficult to treat it as a whole while at the same time going into details. Edwards himself only visited San Domingo, and the information about the British islands other than Jamaica is scanty. For instance, Barbados is dismissed in thirty-five pages. The fifth edition was published in London in 1819, many years after the author’s death. It contains (as did the third and fourth editions) a “prefatory advertisement” by his friend and collaborator, Sir William Young, Governor of Tobago, and a brief “sketch of the life of the author, written by himself a short time before his death.” It also contains descriptions of colonies ceded after Edwards’s death, a “History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade,” and later particulars of the West Indies generally, which would have been more useful had they been put in their several places in the work, instead of at the end. The following is a list of Bryan Edwards’s publications: 1. (_a_) The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies. In two volumes. By Bryan Edwards, Esq., of the Island of Jamaica. _London_, 1793. 4to. [With plates and preface to 2nd edition added afterwards.] (_b_) The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies. In two volumes. By Bryan Edwards, Esq., of the Island of Jamaica. _Dublin_, 1793. 8vo.