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Mammalian Descent,' another friend (Miss Arabella Buckley, now 

 Mrs. Fisher) similarly helped him. In the latter work, his own 

 usual style frequently predominates, full of metaphor and quaint 

 allusions, originating in his imaginative and indeed poetio mind, 

 fully impregnated with ideas and expressions frequent in his favourite 

 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, Professor W. K. Parker earnestly inculcated 

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

 unbiassed 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 proper work is not that of straining our too 

 feeble 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 " Shoulder-girdle, <fcc.," p. 2, 

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

 our work without, and made it fit for ourselves in the field,' we shall 

 be able to build a ' system of anatomy ' which shall truly represent 

 Nature, and not be a mere reflection of the mind of some one of 

 her talented observers." 



Again, at p. 225. in illustration of some results of his work, he 

 says : " The first instance I have given of the Shoulder-girdle (in 

 the Skate) may be compared to a clay model in its first stage, or to 

 the heavy oaken furniture of our forefathers, that ' stood pond'rous 

 and fixed by its own massy weight.' As we ascend the Vertebrate 

 scale, the mass becomes more elegant, more subdivided, and more 

 metamorphosed, until, in the Bird class and among the Mammals, 

 these parts form the framework of limbs than which nothing can be 

 imagined more agile or more apt. So also, as it regards the sternum ; 

 at first a mere outcropping of the feebly developed costal arches in 

 the Amphibia, it becomes the key-stone of perfect arches in 

 the true Reptile ; then the fulcrum of the exquisitely constructed 

 organs of flight in the Bird ; and, lastly, forms the mobile front- wall 

 of the heaving chest of the highest Vertebrate." 



Professor W. K. Parker was a Fellow of the Royal, Linnean, 

 Zoological, and Royal Microscopical Societies; Fellow of King's 

 College, London : Honorary Member of the Philosophical Society of 

 Cambridge, and the Medical and Chirurgical Society. He was also a 

 Member of the Imperial Society of Naturalists of Moscow, and Corre- 

 sponding Member of the Imperial Geological Institute of Vienna, 

 and the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. In 1885 he 



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