772 A MEMOIR OF WILLIAM KITCHEN PARKER, P. R. g. 



give even his youngest sou, Mr. W. K. Parker, "a start in life." From 

 his placid and thoughtful mother he probably inherited much of his 

 love of reading and his talent for learning. 



Always energetic, in spite of constant ill health, Mr. Parker enthu- 

 siastically carried on his medical work and his natural history studies, 

 especially in the microscopic structure of animal and vegetable tissues. 

 Polyzoa and Foramiuifera, collected on a visit to Bognor, and from 

 amoug sponge sand and Indian sea-shells, especially attracted his at- 

 tention. Having sorted, mounted, and drawn numbers of these micro- 

 zoa, he was induced, about 1856, by his friends W, Crawford Williamson 

 and T. Rupert Jones, to work at the Foramiuifera systematically. His 

 paper on the MilioUUdw of the Indian Seas (Trans. Micros. Soc, 1858), 

 and a joint paper (with T. K. Jones) on the Foramiuifera of the Norwe- 

 gian coast (A?iw«/.s ^. if., 1857) resulted; and the latter formed the 

 basis of a memoir on the Arctic and iSTorth Atlantic Foramiuifera (Phil. 

 Trans., 18()5). With T. Rupert Jones, and afterwards with W. B. Car- 

 penter and H. B. Brady, Mr. Parker, down to 1873, described and illus- 

 trated many groups and species of Foramiuifera, recent and fossil (see 

 C. D. Sherboru's "Biography of Foramiuifera" for these papers and 

 memoirs), thereby establishing more accurately a natural classification 

 of these microzoa, determining their bathymetrical conditions, and 

 therefore their value in geology. That he did not neglect anatomical 

 research is shown by memoirs in the Proceedings and Transactious of 

 the Zoological Society on the osteology (chiefly cranial) and systematic 

 position of Balajuiceps (1800), Pterocles (1802), Palamedea (1863), Galli- 

 naceous Birds and Tinamous (1803 and 1800), Kagu (1801 and ]869), 

 Ostriches (1864), Microglossa (1865), Common Fowl (1869), Eel (Nature, 

 1871), skull of Frog (1871), of Crow (1872), Salmon, Tit, Sparrow Hawk, 

 Thrushes, Sturgeon, and Pig (1873). In the mean time the Ray Society 

 had brought out his valuable "Monograph on the structure and devel- 

 opment of the Shoulder Girdle and Sternum in the Vertebrata" (1868); 

 and his Presidential addresses to the Royal Microscopical Society (1872, 

 1873), and notes on the Archjeopteryx (1864), and the fossil Bird bones 

 from the Zebbug Cave, Malta (1805 and 1809), had been published. 

 Subsequently the Royal Society's Transactions contained his abun 

 dantly illustrated memoirs on the skull of the Batrachia (1878 and 

 1880), of the Urodelous Amphibia (1877), the Common Snake (1878), 

 Sturgeon (1882), Lepidosteus (1882), Edentata (1886), Insectivora (1886), 

 and his elaborate memoir on the development of the wing of the Com- 

 mon Fowl (1888), In the " Reports of the Challenger " is his memoir on 

 the Green Turtle (1880) ; and those on Tarsipes (Dundee, 1889), and the 

 Duck and the Auk (Dublin, 1890), are his last works. 



In former times a skull was taken as little more than a dry, symmet- 

 rical, bony structure; or if it were the cartilaginous brain case of a 

 shark, it was to most a mere dried museum specimen. W^hen however 

 the gradations of the elements of the skull, from embryonic beginnings, 

 were traced until their mutual relations and their homologues in other 



