Description
Francis Maitland Balfour (1851-1882) was an embryologist and the first (and only) Professor of Animal Morphology at the University of Cambridge.

Balfour went to Trinity College in 1870 and published his first paper, on the embryology on the chick, before he graduated. After graduating, he was elected Fellow of Trinity in 1874 and and worked for two years at the Stazione Zoological in Naples. His research there was on the embryology of elasmobranch fishes, on which he published several papers and a major book (1878). Using his intellect and charm, Balfour formed around him a major school of embryologists - the first in this country. His Treatise on Comparative Embryology, which summarised the whole field and contained new observations, was judged to be a 'a work full of new light from beginning to end'. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1878 and was awarded their Royal Medal in 1881.

In 1882, a special chair of Animal Morphology at the University of Cambridge was created for Balfour. However, in June that year, while in Switzerland to recuperate from typhoid fever, he and his guide died trying to ascend the Aiguille Blanche de Peuterey mountain in the Mont Blanc Massif.

Michael Foster, his first teacher in Cambridge, wrote, "The remarkable powers which Balfour possessed of rapid yet exact observation, of quick insight into the meaning of things observed, of imaginative daring in hypothesis kept straight by the singularly clear logical sense, through which the proved was sharply distinguished from the merely probable, made all biologists hope that the striking work which he had already accomplished was but the earnest of still greater things to come."

Balfour purchased this microscope directly from Carl Zeiss and it was delivered on 22nd September 1876.

[Adapted from a label at the Department of Zoology]
23/05/2022
Created by: Morgan Bell on 23/05/2022