John Dowson M.R.A.S. was a British indologist notable for his work on Hindu texts. Widely considered to be a preeminent authority of Hinduism in his time, Dowson taught in both India and Britain, eventually being made Professor at University College London (1855) as well as teaching at the East India Company College and the Staff College, Sandhurst.
Dowson contributed to the publications of the Royal Asiatic Society throughout his career, having been introduced to the Society by his uncle Edwin Norris, himself a notable Assyriologist.
John Edye was a shipwright and navy man who worked as Master Shipwright at the Royal Navy Dockyard at Trincomali (modern Trincomalee, Sri Lanka) for five years coinciding with 1829. He then worked at the Chatham Dockyard by at least 1832 before moving to the Department of the Surveyor of the Navy in 1834. Edye was made Chief Clerk at the Surveyor of the Navy's office and worked with Surveyor William Symonds on his many new designs for the Royal Navy's sailing fleet.
Edye's experience in Southern India gave him an expertise and interest in the region's maritime context which continued even after he returned to Britain. He contributed papers reporting on the state of Southern India's ships, ports and natural products to the Royal Asiatic Society's journals in 1834 and 1835, and was approved as a member of the Society in 1835 before retiring from the Society's affairs in 1843.
Joseph Edkins was a British Protestant missionary who spent 57 years in China. He was a Sinologue, specialising in Chinese religions. He was also a linguist, a translator, and a philologist ad was author of many books about the Chinese language and the Chinese religions especially Buddhism. Born in Gloucestershire he became a Protestant minister and was sent by the London Missionary Society, to Shanghai. He worked in the London Missionary Society Press and undertook the translation of many western scientific works into Chinese. He was an active member of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society.
He returned to England in 1858 and was married to Jane Rowbotham Stobbs. They returned to Shanghai. In 1860 the Edkins family moved to Yantai, Shandong, and in 1861 to Tianjin. After his first wife's death he married Janet Wood White i 1863 and they moved to Beijing. He travelled to England in 1873 but was back in China by 1876.
In 1880 he resigned from the London Missionary Society to become a translator for the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs. He was widowed a second time in 1877 and married Johanna Schmidt in 1881. He was appointed to edit and translate a series of Western scientific works into Chinese, resulting in 16 Primers for Western Knowledge (西學啟蒙十六種) published in 1898, which comprised textbooks about zoology, botany, chemistry, geography, physiology, logic and other subjects. In 1903 he survived typhoid and was still writing at the age of 81. He died in Shanghai on Easter Sunday, 1905.