William Kitchen Parker
William Kitchen Parker FRS FRMS (23 June 1823 – 3 July 1890) was a British physician, zoologist and comparative anatomist.
After telling his father that farm work was not for him, Parker entered the Peterborough Grammar School[3] for nine months, and then started on the road to medical education.
Parker married Elizabeth Jeffery whilst still a student: she was the daughter of the clerk to the Vauxhall Bridge Company.
[7] Parker was elected FRS in 1865, and a few years afterwards the Royal Society gave him an annual grant to aid his work, and a generous Wesleyan friend more than once presented £100 towards the cost of publishing some of his plates.
Parker studied at King's College London from 1844 to 1846, and became a student-demonstrator there to Mr (later Sir) William Bowman, the surgeon, histologist and anatomist.
Today he is remembered only as a zoologist, one of a quite a sizeable group – including Thomas Henry Huxley, Richard Owen and Joseph Dalton Hooker – who were qualified in medicine but whose life work was in natural history or one of the newly named biological sciences.
Parker became one of the greatest authorities on the Foraminifera, a group containing microscopic single-celled amoeboid protists with calcareous tests (shells).
These ideas, associated in biology with Goethe and Kant, and developed in anatomy by Oken and Cuvier, were used by Owen in his theoretical expositions.
[20] The weak point in Owen's theory was its basis solely on the more derived and specialised skulls, and even so it took no notice of their embryological development.
He showed from a study of the early stages of lower fish, and also the stickleback and the frog, that the segmentation of the skull in higher vertebrata is a secondary process, and is independent of vertebration.
Parker's distinction was to carry out a careful study of the process in a much wider variety of vertebrates; his ironic comment on the "anatomical suffering caused to fish from their being dragged into harmony with that mischievous piece of work, the vertebrate archetype" shows, from such a gentle man, a surprising vigour in debate.
The work was summarised in Francis Balfour's Comparative Embryology of 1881, and settled the fate of Owen's transcendental archetype theory of the vertebrate skull once and for all.
[23] One of the chief results of this work was, by demonstrating the true homologies of the various bones of the shoulder-girdle in fishes, to overthrow Owen's theory of the nature of limbs.
Although Parker could scarcely write a simple descriptive sentence to save his life, he certainly had a huge grasp of the imagery and poetics of the English language.
Bettany, and his 1884 lectures On mammalian descent were written with the help of a friend, Arabella Buckley, who had been Charles Lyell's secretary.
Perhaps an upbringing in a farmhouse with little reading material apart from the Bible, and little opportunity to practice writing in his early years led to his unusual characteristics as a scientific writer.
