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Biographies

Edwin Ray Lankester (1847 - 1929)

EDWIN RAY LANKESTER (1847-1929) was a prominent Darwinian, educated at Cambridge, and a fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, in 1872. He became Professor of Zoology at University College in 1875, after which in 1891 he was Professor of Comparative Anatomy at Oxford. He was also a Fellow of the Royal Society from 1875, and was director of the Natural History department of the British Museum from 1898 to 1907, for which service he was knighted.

As a zoologist, his technical works on jellyfish and other invertebrates remained academic standards well into the twentieth century, although, like his colleague Thomas Huxley, he also sought to educate the more general public in a series of popular science books. In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), the brilliant yet cantankerous Professor Challenger deigns to call Lankester his ‘gifted friend.’