MEMOIR OF THE LATE W. K. PARKER, P.R.S. 303 



four hours daily in investigating the flora of the district. In two 

 years he had collected and named more than 500 species of 

 plants, and was often quite exhausted when he returned home 

 to breakfast and to the less congenial work of the day. 



On leaving Stamford he became apprentice to Mr. Costal, a 

 medical practitioner at Market Overton, in Rutlandshire, where 

 he acquired the rudiments of surgery and human anatomy, which 

 eventually determined his choice of a profession. In December, 

 1844, he proceeded to London, and became a medical student at 

 Charing Cross Hospital, and subsequently Demonstrator of 

 Physiology to Mr. (now Sir William) Bowman and Dr. Todd at 

 King's College. During this time he resided with the family of a 

 Mr. Booth, a general practitioner, in Little Queen Street, West- 

 minster, — eventually, in 1849, settling down in practice on his 

 own account, in Tachbrook Street, Pimlico, where he married, 

 and resided for many years. 



While at King's College he made many beautiful injected 

 preparations of organs, and laid the foundation for his later 

 microscopical work on the Foraminifera. It was as a student of 

 these minute organisms that he first came before the scientific 

 public, in 1857, when he began to publish, in conjunction with 

 his friend Prof. Rupert Jones, a series of valuable papers in the 

 'Annals and Magazine of Natural History' (1857 — 65), in the 

 'Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society' (1860), and in 

 the 'Philosophical Transactions' (1864). The important share 

 which he took in the preparation of Dr. Carpenter's ' Introduction 

 to the study of the Foraminifera/ published in 1862, by the Ray 

 Society, in a quarto volume of more than 300 pages, with 

 twenty-two beautiful plates and numerous woodcuts, has been 

 fully and freely acknowledged by Dr. Carpenter in his Preface to 

 that volume. Under the auspices of the same Society he 

 produced, in 1868, his Monograph on the structure and develop- 

 ment of the shoulder-girdle and sternum in Vertebrata. As a 

 draughtsman he particularly excelled, and much of the value 

 attaching to the numerous memoirs published by him was due to 

 the excellence of the plates which he himself prepared. 



No man could have worked harder at science, in the intervals 

 of professional duties, than he did, and it is scarcely surprising 

 that the very short intervals which he allowed himself for rest 

 eventually told upon his health and compelled him for a time to 



