monographs were devoted to the avian skeleton. His knowledge of the habits, taxonomy, and general anatomy of birds was most extensive; and such were his stores of anatomical knowledge that he was once known to speak for four hours continuously on the lower jawbone of the raven without saying anything that was other than valuable.
Parker's works on the shoulder-girdle and skull contain few generalisations not to be found in the earlier writings of Rathke, Huxley, and others. His results respecting the skull confirm, with a great extension of detail, the principles laid down in Professor Huxley's Croonian lecture delivered before the Royal Society in 1858. Parker recorded with immense labour, and as the result of protracted observations of representative members of each of the great groups of vertebrates, embryological data which put Professor Huxley's conclusions beyond dispute, and dealt the final death-blow to the vertebral theory of the skull, as elaborated by Owen. Parker's ultimate conclusion was that the ‘cephalic scleromeres are not vertebræ.’ The old vertebral theory was mainly deduced from the detailed comparison of the skull of mammals with the segments of the backbone. But the resemblances between the two were shown by Parker to vanish among the lower vertebrata.
Continental contemporaries were working on parallel lines during the period that Parker was pursuing his researches, and his published work occasionally ran closely parallel with that of his German fellow-workers. But he knew little or nothing of the German language, and his work was all original. It is noteworthy, however, that some of the more striking of his latterly discovered details in the cranial anatomy of the mammalia had been long anticipated by Hagenbach.
Parker's methods of work exhibited an industry and application rarely equalled. His life was wholly absorbed in his researches; he took no part in controversy, and was content, for the most part, to record his investigations, and to leave to his successors the task of testing them with a view to basing on them general conclusions. Parker's detailed discoveries were based upon the dissection of embryos of all classes of vertebrated animals, extending over more than twenty years of devoted and continuous labour, and these dissections were delineated with a masterly fidelity in the profuse illustrations which adorn his works. In some of his determinations he was wrong, and doubt has been thrown upon certain of his minor conclusions. Although he was a diffuse, obscure, and rambling writer, his works constitute a mine of carefully observed facts, the full meaning of which it is for future investigators to interpret. Professor Huxley, who was Parker's chief scientific friend and adviser, gave him an encouragement and guidance which helped to keep in check his discursive habits of mind.
Parker's chief scientific honour was the election to the fellowship of the Royal Society in 1865, followed in 1866 by the presentation of the society's gold medal. He later received the Baly medal of the Royal College of Physicians. In 1864 he was elected a fellow of the Zoological Society honoris causa, with exemption from fees, and in 1871 to 1873 he acted as president of the Royal Microscopical Society. In 1876 he was elected an honorary fellow of King's College, London, and he was also a fellow of the Linnean Society. He was an honorary member of the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, of the Imperial Society of Naturalists, Moscow, and of the Cambridge Philosophical Society.
Parker died suddenly, 3 July 1890, of syncope, at Cardiff, where he was staying with his second son. He was buried at Wandsworth cemetery. He married, in 1849, Miss Elizabeth Jeffery, and the grief caused by her death early in 1890 hastened his own. Seven children survived him—four sons and three daughters. Two of his sons, following in his footsteps, hold professorships in biological science, viz.: Thomas Jeffery Parker, at the university of Otago, New Zealand, and William Newton Parker, at the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire, Cardiff.
[A good biographical sketch of Parker was published in 1893 by his son T. J. Parker; this volume contains a complete and classified list of his publications. Obituary notices appear in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, vol. xlviii. p. xv, in London Quarterly Review for April 1891, in Zoologist, 3rd ser. xiv. p. 302; and shorter ones in Nature, xlii. 297, British Medical Journal, 1890, p. 116, Times, 14 July 1890.]
PARKES, ALEXANDER (1813–1890), chemist and inventor, was the son of a brass lock manufacturer, of Suffolk Street, Birmingham, where he was born on 29 Dec. 1813. He was apprenticed to Messenger & Sons, brassfounders, Birmingham, and subsequently entered the service of Messrs. Elkington, in whose works he had charge of the casting department. His attention was soon directed to the subject of electro-plating, which was then being introduced by his employers, and in 1841 he secured his first patent (No.
