Career
A course of lectures on embryology, delivered by Sir Michael Foster in 1871, turned Balfour's attention to animal morphology. After the tripos, he was selected to occupy one of the two seats allocated to the University of Cambridge at the Naples zoological station. The research work which he began there contributed in an important degree to his election as a Fellow of Trinity in 1874; and also gave him the material for a series of papers (published as a monograph in 1878) on the Elasmobranch fish, which threw new light on the development of several organs in the Vertebrates, in particular of the uro-genital and nervous systems.
His next work was a large treatise, Comparative Embryology, in two volumes; the first, published in 1880, dealing with the Invertebrates, and the second (1881) with the Vertebrates. This book displayed a vigorous scientific imagination, controlled by a logical sense that rigidly distinguished between fact and hypothesis, and it quickly won wide recognition, both as an admirable digest of the numberless observations made with regard to the development of animals during the quarter of a century preceding its publication, and as a work of original research.
Balfour's reputation was now such that other universities became anxious to secure his services, and he was invited to succeed Professor George Rolleston at Oxford and Sir Wyville Thomson at Edinburgh. Although he was only a college lecturer, holding no official post in his university, he declined to leave Cambridge, and in the spring of 1882 the university instituted a special Chair of Animal Morphology for his benefit.
He was a committed Darwinian, though he disagreed with Darwin on the origins of larvae. Darwin assumed that larvae arose from the same stock as adults, but Balfour believed that virtually all larvae are ‘secondary’, i.e. they “have become introduced into the ontogeny of species, the young of which were originally hatched with all the characters of the adult” (Comparative Embyology, Vol 2, p300). In the case of echinoderms, he argued that the bilateral larvae must have been introduced after the establishment of the existing classes, and he challenged Haeckel’s view that these larvae are evidence that echinoderms evolved from bilateral ancestors.
In June, 1878 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and in 1881 was awarded their Royal Medal "For his numerous and important contributions to animal morphology; and more especially for his investigations respecting the origin of the urogenital organs and the cerebrospinal nerves of the Vertebrata; and for his work on the development of the Elasmobranch fishes."
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