Francis Maitland Balfour (1851-1882): A founder of evolutionary embryology

✍ Scribed by Hall, Brian K.

• Book ID: 102337713
• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2003
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 341 KB
• Volume: 299B
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0022-104X
• DOI: 10.1002/jez.b.35

✦ Synopsis

Francis (Frank) Maitland Balfour (Fig. 1), born to wealth and privilege in 1851, 2 fell to his death in a climbing accident in the Swiss Alps in July 1882, In the decade between 1872 and 1882 Balfour rose from outstanding undergraduate to the position of Great Britain's leading evolutionary embryologist.

Frank demonstrated an early aptitude for natural history; for his seventh birthday, he requested a specially designed box with trays and divisions to store his fragile fossils. Educated at Harrow, his essay on the geology of East LothianFsubsequently published with his brother Gerald (Balfour and Balfour, 1872)Fbrought him into contact with Thomas Henry Huxley, who later examined Balfour for the Natural Science Scholarship he secured at Trinity College in the Spring of 1871. Balfour had entered Trinity the previous October, his arrival as an undergraduate coinciding with the arrival of Michael Foster as Praelector in Physiology. Foster, Balfour's mentor and lifelong champion encouraged Frank to undertake original research to determine whether the primitive streak of the early chick embryo (Fig. 2a,b) might serve the same role as the blastopore of amphibian embryos, viz., as the centre from which the antero-posterior embryonic axis arose. Balfour demonstrated a homology between primitive streak and blastopore, published the work while still an undergraduate (Balfour, 1873a,b), and established the basis for his life's work, which was to use comparative embryology to reveal homologies of the parts of organismsFe.g., his studies on Peripatus (Fig. 2c,d)Fand to use embryology to reveal the evolutionary relationships among and between invertebrate and vertebrate animals. 3 All his papers and books were superbly illustrated with figures of extraordinary detail and beauty (Fig. 3), most drawn by his youngest sister Alice.

Balfour and Foster authored a textbook The Elements of Embryology (Foster and Balfour, 1874), written while Balfour was an undergraduate and published soon after his graduation. Rarely has an undergraduate shown such promise. His native ability, energy, enormously popular personality, and financially secure family background, placed him in an ideal position to pursue what would become the strongest program in evolutionary embryology anywhere in the world. We now know evolutionary embryology as evolutionary developmental biology (Hall, '98, 2000;Hall and Olson, 2003).

Darwin's theory of natural selection, in combination with the embryological studies begun by Karl von Baer and transformed by Ernst Haeckel into the biogenetic law of the recapitulation of phylogeny in ontogeny, meant that embryology was regarded as one of the best ways to establish the evolutionary history and origins of groups of 1 This is a modified and expanded version of Hall (2004a) the entry BALFOUR, Francis Maitland (1851-1882) to be published in 2004 in The Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Scientists (B. Lightman, ed.) by Thoemmes Press, Bristol, UK [http://www.thoemmes. com]. It is reproduced by kind permission of the general editor, Dr.