William Henry Flower - London: Transfer To Zoology

London: Transfer To Zoology

In 1860 London intellectual life was alive with talk of evolution. Flower had long been interested in natural history, and now he decided to move his career in that direction, probably under the influence of Thomas Henry Huxley, who was also a comparative anatomist, and Fullerian Professor at the Royal Institution at the time. Flower's first contact with Huxley came about from his early friendship with George Busk, Surgeon to the Seamen's Hospital of HMS Dreadnought (a land base near Portsmouth). Busk was an FRS, became PRCS, and a member of the X Club. Flower succeeded John Thomas Quekett as Conservator of the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England on the recommendation of Huxley and others. He started work in January 1862 and held the post for 22 years.

Flower became associated with Huxley's controversy with Richard Owen concerning the human brain. Owen had erroneously said that the human brain had structures that were not present in other mammals, and separated man off into a Sub-Class of its own instead of a genus in the primates. Huxley contradicted this in a debate at the BA meeting in 1860, and promised a demonstration in due course.

Back in London, Huxley consulted with every expert on the brain that he knew, and that included Flower. His conclusions were made public in 1860 in lectures and publications, but most of the demonstrations were done by Flower using monkey brains rather than the scarce ape brains. Over the years, Flower published papers on the brains of four species of monkey, and acted as Huxley's partner in demonstrations at subsequent BA meetings. At the 1862 meeting in Cambridge when Owen read a paper maintaining his claims, Flower stood up and said "I happen to have in my pocket a monkey's brain" — and produced the object in question! (report in the Times). Few doubted that the small object had Huxley's finger-prints on it...

Another interesting angle on Flower was his combination of religious belief with complete and unequivocal acceptance of evolution. His point of view was close to that of Asa Gray, the American botanist, who wrote a pamphlet entitled Natural Selection not inconsistent with Natural Theology. As the years passed this co-existence of ideas became ever more common with those Christians who were not wedded to literal belief in all aspects of the Bible. In 1883 Flower gave an address to the Church Congress in Reading on evolution: "The bearing of science on religion" (reprinted in his Essays on Museums).

In 1870 he became Hunterian Professor of Comparative Anatomy in succession to Huxley and commenced a series of lectures that ran for fourteen years, all on aspects of the Mammalia. The essence was published in his books of 1870 and 1891. He was President of the Zoological Society of London from 1879 to 1899. In 1882 he was awarded the Royal Medal of the Royal Society.