THE LATE PROFESSOR BALFOUR. 265 
fie LATE PROFESSOR Fi-M. BALFOUR. 
wr aoe, tt 4 
BY. PROF. T. JEFFERY: PARKER: 
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If I had been asked two months ago to name the man whose 
death would be the greatest loss to biological science, J should 
unhesitatingly have said, Francis Balfour. Not because his was 
the greatest name—there are living biologists whose fame his 
would certainly not have surpassed, hardly, perhaps, have 
equalled; but because, while their work was largely, if not mainly, 
already done, his, we all hoped, was mainly to come, and with 
such results as he had achieved from twenty-two to thirty what 
might we not have looked for from thirty to sixty? The man 
who could write the “Treatise on Comparative Embryology ” 
in his sixth lustre, could scarcely have failed but for that terrible 
accident on Mont Blanc, to have made a reputation of the high- 
est order. As it is he has won a place by the side of Rathke, 
Johannes Miiller, and von Baer. 
What struck me most forcibly on meeting Balfour, next to 
the charm of his face and manner, was the singular absence of 
all those faults which may be summed up in the one word 
“voung-mannishness.” Even many years ago he had that maturity 
of judgment, that respect for the opinions of others without any 
yielding of his own convictions, which most men only acquire 
in middle life, if then. The wonderful completeness of his nature 
is in nothing better shown than in the circumstance that while en- 
gaged in absorbing original investigations of his own, he not only 
performed all the duties of a college lecturer, but guided the re- 
searches of his advanced pupils so systematically and so 
thoroughly that he would never allow a single figure to pass of 
which he would not give a complete account. It was this power 
of entering into the work of others without injury to his own 
which fitted him so eminently for his position at Cambridge, and 
which has made the first Professor of Animal Morphology co- 
equal with the first Trinity Przelector in Physiology* in the glory 
of founding a true school of biology in an English University. 
A glance through the bibliography of the last few years will 
show how varied and how important his original work has been, 
many of his researches marking distinct epochs in the history of 
embryology. His power of estimating the true value of his own 
and others’ work, and of forming a clear and impartial opinion 
on disputed questions, is shown again and again in his great 
work on Comparative Embryology—the first attempt at a com- 
plete treatise on the subject, and one of the very few thoroughly 
satisfactory biological text books in the English language, a 
book in which exhaustive knowledge of all aspects of the science 
* Dr. Michael Foster, 
