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SUMMARY OF CURRENT RESEARCHES RELATING TO 
and. still continuing to make progress in anatomy, he became assistant 
to Professor Todd at King’s College, and qualified for medical practice 
in 1849. He made during these years many beautiful injected prepara- 
tions of organs, and also laid the foundation for his later microscopical 
work on the Foraminifera. Indeed, it was as a student of the latter 
minute organisms that he first came before the scientific public in 1857, 
when he began to publish, in conjunction with his friend Professor Rupert 
Jones, a long series of important papers in the ‘Annals and Magazine 
of Natural History,’ in which many significant facts as to their variability 
and polymorphism in parallel series were first brought forward. 
A few years later, ill-health, the result of much unremunerative 
scientific work combined with a laborious medical practice, began to 
make serious inroads on Mr. Parker’s physical strength, and he had to 
give up much of his professional work. In the intervals of the severest 
pain he accomplished some of his most striking researches, which were 
often taken up as an anodyne. Many valuable monographs, such as 
those on the skulls of the common fowl (1869), of the frog (1871), of 
the salmon (1873), of the pig (1874), were the result of his labours, 
and when in 1874 he was appointed one of the Hunterian Professors of 
Comparative Anatomy it was felt that the mantle of Professor Huxley 
had fallen on a worthy successor. 
Professor Parker lectured at the College of Surgeons until 1884, 
giving in his own quaint and discursive way the results of successive 
years of work. He had already been President of the Royal Micro- 
scopical Society iu 1871-2, and this honour was followed by the award 
of a Royal medal by the Royal Society, of which he was already a 
Fellow. When the Government grant of 4000Z. came to be distributed 
by the Royal Society it was generally felt that there could be no more 
fitting recipient of a considerable grant than Mr. Parker, and this was 
continued for many years, being at last partially replaced by a Civil 
List pension. No man ever worked from a purer love of science and of 
the beauty of the Creator’s handiwork, which he delighted to acknowledge. 
He had grown up when minute naked-eye dissection had not been dis- 
placed by microscopic section- cutting, and it w r as a marvel to see him 
handle embryonic skulls a third of an inch in length and patiently dissect 
them under a simple lens till he had revealed features characteristic of 
some very diverse creature in the scale of development, or of some 
ancient animal which combined in itself characters now split up among 
various extreme branches of the vertebrate kingdom. 
Altogether he wrote more than twenty memoirs of first-class 
importance, illustrated by many hundred plates from his own careful 
drawings, and published by the Royal, Zoological, and Linnean Societies. 
Unfortunately they are a sealed book to all but skilled anatomists, for 
notwithstanding brilliant flashes and quaint conceits and illustrations, 
Mr. Parker’s style of exposition by no means did justice to the value of 
his matter. One portion of his work was, however, summarized and 
brought out by him in 1877 with the aid of his friend, Mr. G. T. Bettany, 
under the title ‘ The Morphology of the Skull,’ and another portion 
formed the subject of a volume, issued in 1885, on ‘Mammalian Descent,’ 
being the Hunterian lectures for 1884. But his friends will remember, 
