Born in Devon and educated in Dublin, James Parsons studied medicine in Paris and became doctor of medicine at Rheims in 1736. Appointed physician to the public infirmary of St. Giles in 1738, he began an obstetric practice in London and became a Fellow of the Royal Academy. He studied antiquities, the fine arts, muscular motion, hermaphrodites, and the anatomy of the human bladder; he wrote about the structure of seeds and the analogy between the propagation of animals and that of vegetables.

His claim to fame resides on his 1767 book The Remains of Japhet, in which he first proposed that many of the languages of Europe, Iran, and India had a common ancestor, thus anticipating the observations of Sir William Jones and later students of linguistics. He postulated that the common ancestor of the Indo-Europeans was the biblical Japheth, one of Noah’s three sons, supposed to have migrated from Armenia, the final resting place of the Ark. His book was largely neglected, being tedious and obscure, shrouded in a mass of biblical references, notable for its gullible acceptance of medieval texts and for mistakes such as including North American Indians in Japhet’s descendants and Hungarians among the Indo-European languages.

Reference

JP Mallory. In Search of the Indo-Europeans. London: Thames and Hudson LTD, 1989.