Ray Lankester

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Ray Lankester, by Leslie Ward, 1905.

Sir Edwin Ray Lankester, FRS (May 15, 1847 - August 13, 1929) was a British zoologist, born in London [1].

Ray Lankester was the son of Edwin Lankester, also an eminent scientist, who pioneered work in the abolition of cholera in London. Ray Lankester was probably named after the naturalist John Ray. He was a large man with a large presence, of warm human sympathies and in his childhood a great admirer of Abraham Lincoln. His interventions, responses and advocacies were often forceful.

Lankester was Jodrell Professor of Zoology at University College, London from 1874 to 1890 and Linacre Professor of Comparative Anatomy at Oxford University from 1891 to 1898, and was director of the Natural History Museum from 1898 to 1907. He was a founder in 1884 of the Marine Biological Association at Plymouth. Influential as teacher and writer on biological theories, comparative anatomy, and evolution, Lankester studied the protozoa, mollusca, and arthropoda. In 1880, Lankester wrote the social Darwinist book: Degeneration a chapter in Darwinism.

He was knighted in 1907. He was awarded the Copley Medal in 1913.

Lankester was hugely influential both as a teacher and a scientist. He was, peculiarly, a friend of Karl Marx in the latter's later years and was among the few persons present in his funeral. Lankester taught many students who later went on to become famous zoologists themselves including, W. F. R. Weldon (1860-1906) who went on to succeed Lankester to the chair at UCL. As a zoologist his work was wide ranging and he was the first to show the relationship of the horseshoe crab or Limulus to the Arachnida. His Limulus specimens can still be seen in the UCL museum today.

When Lankester left to take up the Linacre chair at Oxford in 1891, the museum continued to grow under Weldon who added a number of extremely rare specimens. Weldon is perhaps best known for founding the science of biometry with Francis Galton (1822-1911) and Karl Pearson (1857-1936). Weldon followed Lankester to Oxford in 1899 [2]

Lankester had close family connections with Suffolk (the Woodbridge and Felixstowe area), and was an active member of the Rationalist group associated with the circle of Thomas Huxley, Samuel Laing and others. He was a friend of the Rationalist Edward Clodd of Aldeburgh. From 1901 to his death in 1929 he was Honorary President of the Ipswich Museum. He became convinced of the human workmanship of the (now unfavoured) 'Pre-palaeolithic' implements and rostro-carinates, and championed their cause at the Royal Society in 1910-1912. Through correspondence he became the scientific mentor of the Suffolk prehistorian James Reid Moir (1879-1944).

Lankester was active in attempting to expose the frauds of Spiritualist mediums during the 1920s. He was an important writer of popular science, his weekly newspaper columns over many years being assembled and reprinted in a series of books entitled Science from an Easy Chair (first series, 1910; second series, 1912). After 1869 he edited the Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science (jointly with his father, 1869-71).[3]His writings include: