| Activity | Parker was born in the village of Dogsthorpe, near Peterborough in the County of Northamptonshire.Parker's father, Thomas Parker, was a working farmer living in a thatched house built in 1635. Thomas was a Wesleyan of the old school: a Methodist-Churchman, God-fearing and courteous, farming his own land. He married the daughter of another farmer, Sarah Kitchen, whose name was also given to their son William.
William Parker was the second son, he went to a village dame school early in life, then to parish schools in Werrington and Paston. As was the way then, schooling was interspersed with farm-work. After telling his father that farm-work was not for him, Parker entered the Peterborough Grammar School for nine months, and then started on the road to medical education. He spent three years apprenticed to an apothecary, using his spare time to teach himself about the plants of the neighborhood. His knowledge of botany became remarkably extensive and accurate.
In 1842 he became apprenticed to a country surgeon. During this time he continued educating himself in natural history by reading, looking and doing. The doing consisted of collecting and dissecting birds and mammals, and working up a portfolio of exquisitely beautiful and accurate drawings.
Parker married Elizabeth Jeffery whilst still a student: she was the daughter of the Clerk to the Vauxhall Bridge Company. Her mother was the sister of Joseph Prendergast DD (1791–1875), the Headmaster of Colfe's Grammar School (1831–1857), and the benefactor of Prendergast School, both in the borough of Lewisham.
William and Elizabeth had seven children, three daughters and four sons. The first son ((T. Jeffery Parker) became Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy in the University of Otago, New Zealand; the second (William Newton Parker) became Professor of Biology in the University College, Cardiff; the third was a draghtsman and lithographer; the fourth was a surgeon. In his work on the vertebrate skull Parker became close to Thomas Henry Huxley, and named one of his sons after him. His second son was sent to study under Huxley, and became one of Huxley's demonstrators.
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. Later in life a State pension was awarded.
The honours and appointments Parker gained later in life were due mainly for his work on the vertebrate skeleton and its significance in establishing a "true theory of the vertebrate skull" (Edward Sabine).
Parker studied at King's College London from 1844–46, and became a student-demonstrator there to Mr (later Sir) William Bowman, the surgeon, histologist and anatomist. He attended Charing Cross Hospital in 1846–47. He never took notes during lectures, but drew sketches, and claimed he remembered the facts as well as anyone who took notes. He produced sheet after sheet of artistic drawing, all worthy of publication and large numbers of skeletons of birds and mammals. He attended Richard Owen's lectures at the College of Surgeons, and "received with enthusiasm the doctrine of the archetype which he was afterwards to do so much to overturn".
Parker avoided taking exams, and remained for many years with the minimum qualification for running a general medical practice, which in those days was an LSA (Licenciate of the Society of Apothecaries), a qualification of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries. From 1849, Parker ran a general practice in London for many years, at various locations. The income supported his family, but his interest was in zoology, at which he was entirely self-taught. Today he is remembered only as a zoologist, one of a quite a sizeable group who were qualified in medicine but whose life work was in natural history or one of the newly named biological sciences.
Introduced to the microscope during his medical studies, Parker continued to study the microscopic structure of tissues. It was on a visit to Bognor collecting sand that he encountered Polyzoa and Foraminifera, which he sorted, mounted and studied. Parker became one of the greatest authorities on the Foraminifera, a group containing microscopic single-celled amoeboid protists with calcareous tests (shells). Had he not met Rupert Jones and Crawford Williamson he might have remained an unpublished amateur. It was Jones, mainly, who taught him how to present his considerable knowledge, and together they wrote 34 papers on the forams.
At the same time, Parker worked on his dissections, preparations and skeletons of vertebrates, especially birds. He developed, for example, about 300 preparations of bird wings and many complete skeletons. This work resulted in 24 papers on birds, including one on Archaeopteryx. There is a general article on birds in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th edition.
[edit] The assault on Owen's systemHuxley was the first man to attack Owen's ideas on the vertebrate skeleton, in his Croonian Lecture to the Royal Society in 1858. 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. The basis of the work was embryology, but the early history of the skull was known in only a few species.
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. "It is high time for us to have ceased from transcendentalism: of what use is it?" he asked.[19]
From 1865 to 1888 Parker published 36 studies on the vertebrate skull, including a monograph . The entire series comprises nearly 1800 pages of letterpress and about 270 plates. 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.
Another major vertebrate project was a monograph on the comparative anatomy of the vertebrate shoulder-girdle (pectoral girdle). 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. Parker showed (contrary to Owen) that the true shoulder-girdle is from the first totally independent of the skull. In teleost and ganoid fish, the skull and shoulder-girdle are brought into connexion by derivatives of the skin-skeleton, not by bones of the shoulder-girdle. Discoveries like this alerted Parker to the failure of the great system of transcendental anatomy which Owen had done so much to establish.
After Flower became enfeebled Parker took the MRCS by viva voce and was appointed Hunterian Professor at the Royal College of Surgeons, a post they shared jointly.
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