The New International Encyclopædia/Parker, William Kitchen

PARKER, (1823-90). An English naturalist and morphologist, born at Dogsthorpe, near Peterborough. He studied medicine at King's College, London, and began to practice in 1849. In 1873 he was appointed Hunterian professor in the Royal College of Surgeons, conjointly with Prof. W. H. Flower. His chief and most suggestive work was on the comparative osteology of the higher vertebrates, from amphibian to mammal. He constantly dwelt on the developmental side and on the phylogeny of the vertebrates, making many improvements in the classification of the types he studied. His larger monographs were: Monograph on the Structure and Development of the Shoulder-Girdle and Sternum in the Vertebrata (1868), and memoirs on the skull of the Batrachia (1878 and 1880), the urodelous Amphibia (1877), the common snake (1878), sturgeon (1882), Lepidosteus (1882), Edentata (1886), Insectivora (1886), and an elaborate paper on the development of the wing of the common fowl (1869). His general works were Morphology of the Skull (1877) and On Mammalian Descent (1885).