D.C.L. of Oxford University in 1891. He was president of the British
Association in 1904, and became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1888. He
was known from early life as a cultured musician, and became an
enthusiastic golf player, having been captain of the Royal and Antient Golf
Club of St Andrews in 1894-1895.

(H. CH.)

BALFOUR, FRANCIS MAITLAND (1851-1882), British biologist, younger brother
of Arthur James Balfour, was born at Edinburgh on the 10th of November
1851. At Harrow school he showed but little interest in the ordinary
routine, but in one of the masters, Mr George Griffith, he fortunately
found a man who encouraged and aided him in the pursuit of natural science,
a taste for which, and especially for geology, had been cultivated in him
by his mother from an early age. Going into residence at Trinity College,
Cambridge, in 1870, he was elected a natural science scholar of his college
in the following year, and although his reading was not ordered on the
lines usual for the Schools, he obtained the second place in the Natural
Science Tripos of December 1873. A course of lectures on embryology,
delivered by Sir Michael Foster in 1871, definitely turned his attention to
animal morphology, and, after his 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 afforded him material for a series of papers (published as a monograph
in 1878) on the Elasmobranch fishes, which threw new light on [v.03 p.0255]
the development of several organs in the Vertebrates, in particular of the
uro-genital and nervous systems. His next work was to write 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, always
controlled by a logical sense that rigidly distinguished between proved
fact and mere hypothesis, and it at once won wide recognition, not only 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, but also on account of the large amount of original research
incorporated in its pages. Balfour's reputation was now such that other
universities became