species of plants. While still a druggist's assistant he read physiology for the first time; and at the end of the apprenticeship he was articled to a surgeon at Market Overton in Rutland, with whom he remained for two years. An enthusiasm for anatomical study quickly grew in him. He dissected every animal that he could obtain, and made a valuable series of notes and drawings, the greater part of which remains unpublished. In 1844 he left Market Overton for London, and became resident assistant to a Mr. Booth, a general practitioner in Little Queen Street, Westminster. He afterwards studied at the Charing Cross Hospital, and was later appointed assistant to Dr. R. B. Todd, physiologist at King's College. While a medical student he attended the lectures of Professor (afterwards Sir Richard) Owen [q. v.] at the Royal College of Surgeons. It was not, however, until he came under the influence of Dr. Todd's colleague, William (afterwards Sir William) Bowman, the oculist and physiologist, that his exceptional capacity was recognised or that he received any real encouragement to pursue anatomical research.
In 1849 he became a licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries, and commenced life as a general practitioner in Pimlico. In that neighbourhood he resided until his retirement from practice in 1883, moving in succession from Tachbrook Street to Bessborough Street and Claverton Street. Although Parker cared most for biological research, he did not neglect his patients; and much of his best work was accomplished in the intervals of an arduous practice. In 1861 he was an unsuccessful candidate for the curatorship of the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons. In 1883 he retired from practice, and six years later a civil service pension was conferred on him. He had already received, through the Royal Society, many payments from the ‘Government Grant Fund for the Encouragement of Scientific Research.’
Meanwhile, in 1873, he was made Hunterian professor of comparative anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons, having first been admitted a member of the college after a formal examination, as had been done in the case of Sir Charles Bell [q. v.] He delivered ten courses of lectures in the theatre of the college. But his utterances were more fervid than perspicuous. He was liable to long digressions from the main topic, and his mind worked too rapidly to allow him to express himself with clearness, or at times even with coherence. Of these courses, the last only, given in 1885, was published in book form. It bore the title ‘Mammalian Descent,’ and was printed at the instigation of Miss Arabella Buckley. It exhibits all Parker's defects as a lecturer. His eldest son has said of it that it is ‘unsatisfactory enough if one goes to it with a view of getting a succinct statement of our present knowledge as to the mutual relations and phylogeny of the mammalia.’ ‘Full of quaint fancies and suggestive illustrations,’ it is, in fact, a collection of moral lessons, interspersed with poetic effusions and outbursts of intense enthusiasm, rather than a scientific treatise.
His scientific memoirs number in all ninety-nine, and his miscellaneous writings but five. The first thirty-six of the former were confined to the Foraminifera, and were mostly written in conjunction with his friends Professors T. Rupert Jones and H. B. Brady, and published between 1858 and 1869 in the ‘Annals and Magazine of Natural History,’ the ‘Journal of the Geological Society,’ and elsewhere. In 1862 he appeared as joint author with Dr. W. B. Carpenter and Professor Rupert Jones of the ‘Introduction to the Study of the Foraminifera’ (published by the Ray Society). ‘The Structure and Development of the Shoulder-girdle and Sternum in the Vertebrata’ (1868) was published by the same society. The numerous drawings with which this work is illustrated were all executed from original preparations made from a great variety of species by Parker himself. His observations confirmed the view that the forelimb is attached to the trunk by an arch consisting of a coracoid or anterior, and a scapular or posterior element, at the meeting-point of which the humerus is always articulated. It showed that Richard Owen's view that the forelimb consists of a number of outlying apophyses of one of the imaginary vertebral segments of the skull is untenable, even supposing that the skull be allowed to consist of a series of vertebræ.
Parker's most extensive work as an anatomist is that upon the skull. His researches and conclusions on this subject are embodied in a series of laborious monographs and a number of smaller papers, published over a period of five-and-twenty years (mostly in the Transactions of the Royal, Linnean, and Zoological Societies). These papers are estimated to cover eighteen hundred pages of letterpress, and are illustrated by about 270 elaborate quarto plates. His work upon the skull was reduced into book form, in 1877, by G. T. Bettany, under the title ‘The Morphology of the Skull,’ and this volume gives the best conception of the breadth and nature of Parker's labours. His papers on the bird's skull are perhaps the best. Both his earliest anatomical studies and his last series of published
