440 NINETEENTH CENTURY. PT. IIL 



1828. Among others, Professor Kitchen Parker, deeply 

 impressed with the truth of the evolution of animal life, has 

 spent more than thirty years in dissecting the embryos of 

 all classes of vertebrate animals. . By this means he is 

 tracing out the hidden links of structure between widely 

 separated orders, and though the many proofs of wide- 

 spreading relationship which he detects are far too intricate 

 and involved to be shortly explained, yet he is slowly but 

 surely demonstrating, from embryos often not half an inch 

 long, the stages through which fish and reptile, bird and 

 beast, have passed in ancient times to their present widely 

 varied forms. Another enthusiastic English embryologist, 

 Professor Francis Balfour of Cambridge, died by a fatal 

 slip on Mont Blanc in 1882, at the early age of thirty-two. 

 He had, however, already founded a school of 'Morphology,' 

 which bade fair to be a new starting point in science. His 

 untimely death has left to the pupils who adored him 

 the sad but grateful task of carrying on the work he 

 began so well. Lastly, Professor Weissmann of Freyburg, 

 and Mr. Geddes of Edinburgh, have brought forward of 

 late years theories which are a great help in forming a con- 

 ception of the starting-point of the embryo in plants and 

 animals, and the relations between growth, reproduction, 

 and heredity; but these theories are too new and too 

 difficult to discuss here. 



Chief Works conml/ed. L. Agnssiz's 'Centenary Address on A. 

 von Humboldt,' 1869 ; Humboldt's 'Cosmos;' Lamarck's 'Philosophic 

 Zoologiqne ; ' Cuvier's ' Ossemens Fossiles;' Geoffrey St.-Hilaire's 

 ' Zoologie Generale Suites a Buffon;' 'Vie et Travaux deG. St.-Hilaire;' 

 Flourens' ' Eloge de Cuvier ; ' Lauder's ' Memoir of Cuvier ; ' Memoir 

 of Lamarck ; ' Huxley on Von Baer Appendix to Baden Powell's 

 ' Unity of Worlds ;' Haddon, ' Introduction to Embryology j ' Weis* 

 manu, * Nature,' vol. xxxvi. 



