Many of the men who later became household names in Linguistics did not originally come from Philology or related disciplines: Roget, author of the famous dictionary of synonyms, took his first degree in Medicine, Boas, author of the Handbook of American Indian Languages and one of the first to describe hitherto unknown languages, had a degree in Physics and Geography, Cobbet, author of the Grammar of the English Language (1819), the son of a farmer, wanted to go to sea but ended up in the army, Firth, who later became the first professor of Linguistics in England (1944), had graduated from Leeds University with a first-class degree in History, Daniel Jones (whose father was one of the founders of the All England Tennis Club), the distinguished phonetician who later developed the concept of cardinal vowels, took his first degree in Mathematics and then became a lawyer, Saussure first studied Physics and Chemistry (but then switched to Linguistics), Prendergast, author of The Mastery of Languages, was an official in the Indian Civil Service, and so was William Jones, who, with his discovery of the similarities between Latin, Greek and Sanskrit and other languages laid the foundation of the study of Indo-European languages, and Whorf (of Sapir-Whorf fame), was basically an amateur and worked for a fire-insurance company all his life.