Francis (Frank)
Maitland Balfour, known as
F. M. Balfour, (November 10, 1851 - July 19, 1882) was a
BritishThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe. It is an island country, spanning an archipelago including Great Britain, the northeastern part of Ireland, and many small islands...
biologistA biologist is a scientist devoted to and producing results in biology through the study of life.Typically biologists study organisms and their relationship to their environment. Biologists involved in basic research attempt to discover underlying mechanisms that govern how organisms work...
. He lost his life while attempting the ascent of
Mont BlancMont Blanc or Monte Bianco is the highest mountain in the Alps and in Western Europe. It rises above sea level and is ranked 11th in the world in topographic prominence...
. He was regarded by his colleagues as one of the greatest biologists of his day and
Charles DarwinCharles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist who realised and presented compelling evidence that all species of life have evolved over time from common ancestors, through the process he called natural selection...
's successor.
The younger brother of the politician,
Arthur BalfourArthur James Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour, KG, OM, PC, DL was a British Conservative politician and statesman...
, he was born at
EdinburghEdinburgh is the capital city of Scotland. It is the second largest Scottish city, after Glasgow, and the seventh-most populous in the United Kingdom. The City of Edinburgh Council is one of Scotland's 32 local government council areas....
in
ScotlandScotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
. He attended
Harrow SchoolHarrow School, commonly known simply as "Harrow", is an independent school for boys situated in the town of Harrow, in north-west London. Harrow has educated boys since 1243 but was officially founded by John Lyon under a Royal Charter of Elizabeth I in 1572....
, where he showed no outstanding ability.
Francis (Frank)
Maitland Balfour, known as
F. M. Balfour, (November 10, 1851 - July 19, 1882) was a
BritishThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe. It is an island country, spanning an archipelago including Great Britain, the northeastern part of Ireland, and many small islands...
biologistA biologist is a scientist devoted to and producing results in biology through the study of life.Typically biologists study organisms and their relationship to their environment. Biologists involved in basic research attempt to discover underlying mechanisms that govern how organisms work...
. He lost his life while attempting the ascent of
Mont BlancMont Blanc or Monte Bianco is the highest mountain in the Alps and in Western Europe. It rises above sea level and is ranked 11th in the world in topographic prominence...
. He was regarded by his colleagues as one of the greatest biologists of his day and
Charles DarwinCharles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist who realised and presented compelling evidence that all species of life have evolved over time from common ancestors, through the process he called natural selection...
's successor.
Life
The younger brother of the politician,
Arthur BalfourArthur James Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour, KG, OM, PC, DL was a British Conservative politician and statesman...
, he was born at
EdinburghEdinburgh is the capital city of Scotland. It is the second largest Scottish city, after Glasgow, and the seventh-most populous in the United Kingdom. The City of Edinburgh Council is one of Scotland's 32 local government council areas....
in
ScotlandScotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
. He attended
Harrow SchoolHarrow School, commonly known simply as "Harrow", is an independent school for boys situated in the town of Harrow, in north-west London. Harrow has educated boys since 1243 but was officially founded by John Lyon under a Royal Charter of Elizabeth I in 1572....
, where he showed no outstanding ability. However, one of the masters,
George GriffithGeorge Griffith , full name George Chetwyn Griffith-Jones, was a prolific British science fiction writer and noted explorer who wrote during the late Victorian and Edwardian age. Many of his visionary tales appeared in magazines such as Pearson's Magazine and Pearson's Weekly before being published...
, encouraged and aided him in the pursuit of natural science, a taste for which, especially
geologyGeology is the science and study of the solid and liquid matter that constitutes the Earth. The field of geology encompasses the study of the composition, structure, physical properties, dynamics, and history of Earth materials, and the processes by which they are formed, moved, and changed...
, he had acquired from his mother. Entering
Trinity College, CambridgeTrinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Trinity has more members than any other college in Cambridge or Oxford, with around 700 undergraduates, 430 graduates, and over 160 Fellows ....
, in 1870, he was elected a natural science scholar of his college in the following year, and obtained second place in the Natural Science
TriposThe University of Cambridge, England, divides the different kinds of honours bachelor's degree by Tripos , a word which has an obscure etymology, but which may be traced to the three-legged stool candidates once used to sit on when taking oral examinations...
of December 1873.
Career
A course of lectures on
embryologyEmbryology is the study of the development of an embryo. An embryo is defined as any organism in an early stage well before birth or hatching, or in plants, before germination occurs....
, delivered by Sir
Michael FosterSir Michael Foster was an English physiologist.He was born in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire and educated at University College School, London....
in 1871, turned Balfour's attention to animal morphology. After the tripos, he was selected to occupy one of the two seats allocated to the
University of CambridgeThe University of Cambridge , located in the City of Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom, is the second oldest university in the English-speaking world and the fourth oldest in Europe...
at the
NaplesNaples in Italy, is the capital of the region of Campania and of the province of Naples. The city is known for its rich history, art, culture, architecture, music and gastronomy, playing an important role throughout much of its existence; it is over 2,800 years old...
zoological station. The research work which he began there contributed in an important degree to his election as a Fellow of Trinity in 1874; and also gave him the material for a series of papers (published as a monograph in 1878) on the Elasmobranch fish, which threw new light on the development of several organs in the
VertebrateVertebrates are members of the subphylum Vertebrata, chordates with backbones or spinal columns. About 58,000 species of vertebrates have been described. Vertebrata is the largest subphylum of chordates, and contains many familiar groups of large land animals. Vertebrates comprise cyclostomes, bony...
s, in particular of the uro-genital and nervous systems.
His next work was a large treatise,
Comparative Embryology, in two volumes; the first, published in 1880, dealing with the
InvertebrateAn invertebrate is an animal without a vertebral column. The group includes 95% of all animal species — all animals except those in the Chordate subphylum Vertebrata ....
s, and the second (1881) with the
VertebrateVertebrates are members of the subphylum Vertebrata, chordates with backbones or spinal columns. About 58,000 species of vertebrates have been described. Vertebrata is the largest subphylum of chordates, and contains many familiar groups of large land animals. Vertebrates comprise cyclostomes, bony...
s. This book displayed a vigorous scientific imagination, controlled by a logical sense that rigidly distinguished between fact and hypothesis, and it quickly won wide recognition, both as an admirable digest of the numberless observations made with regard to the development of animals during the quarter of a century preceding its publication, and as a work of original research.
Balfour's reputation was now such that other universities became anxious to secure his services, and he was invited to succeed Professor
George RollestonGeorge Rolleston MA MD FRCP FRS was an English physician and zoologist. He was the first Linacre Professor of Anatomy and Physiology to be appointed at the University of Oxford, a post he held from 1860 until his death in 1881...
at
OxfordOxford is a city, and the county town of Oxfordshire, in South East England. The city has a population of just under 165,000, with 151,000 living within the district boundary. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through Oxford and meet south of the city centre...
and Sir Wyville Thomson at
EdinburghEdinburgh is the capital city of Scotland. It is the second largest Scottish city, after Glasgow, and the seventh-most populous in the United Kingdom. The City of Edinburgh Council is one of Scotland's 32 local government council areas....
. Although he was only a college lecturer, holding no official post in his university, he declined to leave Cambridge, and in the spring of 1882 the university instituted a special Chair of Animal
MorphologyIn biology morphology is the form, structure and configuration of an organism.This includes aspects of the outward appearance as well as the form and structure of the internal parts like bones and organs...
for his benefit.
Early death
He never delivered a lecture in his new position. In the first term after his appointment he was prevented from working by an attack of
typhoid feverTyphoid fever, also known as enteric fever, Salmonella typhi or commonly just typhoid, is an illness. Common worldwide, it is transmitted by the ingestion of food or water contaminated with feces from an infected person. The bacteria then perforate through the intestinal wall and are phagocytosed...
. Going to the
AlpsThe Alps are one of the great mountain range systems of Europe, stretching from Austria and Slovenia in the east; through Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Germany; to France in the west....
for his health, he was killed, probably on July 19, 1882, attempting the ascent of the Aiguille Blanche,
Mont BlancMont Blanc or Monte Bianco is the highest mountain in the Alps and in Western Europe. It rises above sea level and is ranked 11th in the world in topographic prominence...
, at that time unscaled. Besides being a brilliant morphologist, Balfour was an accomplished naturalist. Huxley thought he was "the only man who can carry out my work", and that the deaths of Balfour and W.K. Clifford were "the greatest loss to science in our time"..
He was a committed Darwinian, though he disagreed with Darwin on the origins of larvae. Darwin assumed that larvae arose from the same stock as adults, but Balfour believed that virtually all larvae are ‘secondary’, i.e. they “have become introduced into the ontogeny of species, the young of which were originally hatched with all the characters of the adult” (
Comparative Embyology, Vol 2, p300). In the case of echinoderms, he argued that the bilateral larvae must have been introduced after the establishment of the existing classes, and he challenged Haeckel’s view that these larvae are evidence that echinoderms evolved from bilateral ancestors.