OBITUARY NOTICES OF FELLOWS DECEASED. 



THOMAS JEFFERY PARKER, eldest son of the late William Kitchen 

 Parker, F.R.S., was born at 124, Tachbrook Street, London, S.W., on 

 October 17, 1850. As a boy he showed a taste for literature and art 

 rather than for science, and this taste was retained throughout life. 

 Being brought up in London, he had little opportunity of developing 

 a taste for outdoor natural history; indeed, in many letters to his 

 friends Parker afterwards referred to this with regret. His subse- 

 quent work, and the introduction to the ' Text-Book of Zoology,' 

 written in conjunction with his friend, Professor W. A. Haswell, F.E.S., 

 and completed but a short time before his death, alike prove that his 

 love of Nature was real and that he was fully alive to the importance 

 of a knowledge of the appearance and habits of living things as a 

 preliminary to the more serious and academic study of the phenomena 

 manifested by them. 



Parker received his school training at Clarendon House, Kennington 

 Road, living at home the while, and constitutionally he was never very 

 robust nor much inclined for athletics. On leaving school he entered as 

 a student ,t the Royal College of Chemistry and Royal School of Mines, 

 where in 1871 he was awarded the Edward Forbes medal and prize of 

 books for biology ; and it was the contact with Huxley thus obtained, 

 aided by the influence and loving example of his own father, which 

 moulded Parker's after life. At that time the lectures given in the 

 Royal School of Mines were illustrated only by specimens in the 

 Museum of Practical Geology. Practical work was otherwise nil 

 and of Huxley's discourses Parker wrote, " As one listened to him 

 one felt that Comparative Anatomy was indeed worthy of the 

 devotion of a life, and that to solve a morphological problem was as 

 fine a thing as to win a battle." Thus inspired, Parker left Jermyn 

 Street, to fill the office of science master at a school in Yorkshire ; but 

 in 1872 he returned to London, on the occasion of the transfer of the 

 Department of Biology of the Royal School of Mines to the building 

 now known as the Royal College of Science, at South Kensington, 

 and shortly afterwards undertook, at Huxley's special request, the 

 Demonstratorship in that subject an event which marked the turning- 

 point in his career. Writing of the work some years later, he remarked 

 that, " With the exception of a fortnight's Science Teachers' Course and 



VOL. LXIV. b 



