The Paris society was set up by William Frederic Edwards, with a definite research programme in mind. Edwards had been lecturing for a decade on the deficiency of considering the races as purely linguistic groups. The "Oxford English Dictionary" records the term "ethnology" used in English by James Cowles Prichard in 1842, in his "Natural History of Man", for the "history of nations". The approach to ethnology current at the time of the Society's founding relied on climate and social factors to explain human diversity; the debate was still framed by Noah's Flood, and the corresponding monogenism of human origins. Prichard was a major figure in looking at human variability from a diachronic angle, and argued for ethnology as such a study, aimed at resolving the question of human origins.