Balfour, Francis Maitland (1851-1882)

Scottish biologist and expert in embryology. His dedicated research at Cambridge University led to the establishment of a professorship in animal morphology there. He was killed while trying to climb Mont Blanc in 1882.

Balfour was born in Edinburgh, educated at Harrow, and won a scholarship to study natural science at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1870. He furthered his study of animal morphology by winning one of the two seats allocated to Cambridge at the zoological research station at Naples. Inspired by the work of the Cambridge physiologist Michael Foster in comparative embryology, he published studies on the embryology of invertebrates (1880) and vertebrates (1881).