A Memoir of williAm kitchen parker, f. r. s. ?73 



"Vertebrates were established} light was thrown on the wonderful com- 

 pleteness of organic uniformity and singleness of design. How such 

 studies can be carried on both by minute dissection and the modern art 

 of parallel slicing, and not by one method alone, is to be gathered from 

 his teaching. 



Mr. Parker was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1865, and in 

 the year following he received a royal medal for his comprehensive, 

 exact, and useful researches in the developmental osteology, or embry- 

 onal morphology, of vertebrates. Some few years afterwards the lioyal 

 Society gave him an annual grant to aid in the prosecution of his stud- 

 ies ; and, when that was discontinued, a pension from the Crown was 

 graciously and appropriately awarded to him. A generous friend, be- 

 longing to a well-known Wesleyan family, more than once presented 

 £100 towards the cost of some of the numerous plates illustrating his 

 grand memoirs in the philosophical transactions. 



In 1873, he received the diploma as member of the Royal College of 

 Surgeons, and was appointed Hunterian professor. Professor Flower 

 being invalided for a time ; and afterwards both held the professorship 

 conjointly. His earnestniss and wide views were well appreciated, 

 opening up the modern aspect of comparative anatomy, and showing 

 that both in man and the lower vertebrates the wonderful structural 

 development of their bony framework should be studied in a strictly 

 morphological rather than a teleological method, and that its stages and 

 resultant forms could be regarded only in the Darwinian aspect. 



These lectures, given in abstract in the medical journals, became the 

 basis of his " Morphology of the Skull," in writing which, from his dic- 

 tation and notes, Mr. G. T. Bettany kindly assisted him; and again, in 

 a semi-popular book, " ;Jn Mammalian Descent," another friend (Miss 

 Arabella Buckley, now Mrs. Fisher) similarly helped him. In the hit- 

 ter work his own usual style frequently predominates, full of metaphor 

 and quaint allusions, originating in his imagiuative and indeed poetic 

 mind, fully impregnated with ideas and expressions frequent in his 

 favorite and much-read books — Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, some of 

 the old divines, and above all the old English Bible. 



Separating himself from the trammels of foregone conclusions and 

 from the formulated but imperfect misleading conceptions of some of 

 his predecessors in biology, whom he left for the teaching of Rathke, 

 Gegenbaur, and Huxley, Prof. W. K. Parker earnestly inculcated the 

 necessity of single-sighted research, and the following up of any un- 

 biased elucidations, to whatever natural conclusion they may lead. 

 Simple and firm in Christian faith, resolute in scientific research, he 

 felt free from dread of any real collision between science and religion. 

 He insisted that ''our i)roper work is not that of straining our too fee- 

 ble faculties at system building, but humble and patient attention to 

 what nature herself teaches, comparing actual things with actual" 

 (Proc. Zool. Soc, 1864); and in his '' Slioulder girdle, etc.," page U, he 

 writes: " Then, in the times to come, when we have 'prepared our 



