Francis Maitland Balfour (1851-1882)

During the 1870s and early 1880s, the British morphologist Francis Maitland Balfour contributed in important ways to the budding field of evolutionary embryology [4], especially through his comparative embryological approach to uncovering ancestral relationships between groups. As developmental biologist and historian Brian Hall [5] has observed, the field of evolutionary embryology [4] in the nineteenth century was the historical ancestor of modernday evolutionary developmental biology [6]. Balfour?s work was notably inspired by Charles Darwin?s theory of evolution [7] and Ernst Haeckel?s account of the relationships between embryology [4] and evolution [7]. Only a decade after Balfour?s program of research began, an alpine climbing accident robbed Britain of its most promising embryologist.