Edwin Goodrich was a British zoologist. He was the Linacre professor of comparative anatomy at the University of Oxford.
Background
Edwin Goodrich was born on June 21, 1868, in Weston-super-mare, North Somerset, United Kingdom. He was a son of Octavius Pitt Goodrich and Frances Lucinda Parker. When Goodrich was two weeks old his father died, and his mother took him, another son, and a daughter to live with her mother at Pau.
Education
Edwin attended an English school and a French lycée at Pau. In 1888 he entered the Slade School at University College, London, as an art student. And while there he became acquainted with E. Ray Lankester, who interested him in zoology. On coming to Oxford from London, Goodrich entered Merton College, Oxford as an undergraduate in 1892 and graduated with first-class honors in 1895.
When Lankester became a professor of comparative anatomy at Oxford, he made Goodrich his assistant in 1892; this marked the start of the researches which during half a century made Goodrich the greatest comparative anatomist of his day. In 1921 he was appointed Linacre professor of comparative anatomy, a post he held until 1945. He served as editor of the Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science from 1920 until his death.
From the start of his researches, most of which were devoted to marine organisms, Goodrich made himself acquainted at first hand with the marine fauna of Plymouth, Roscoff, Banyuls, Naples, Helgoland, Bermuda, Madeira, and the Canary Islands. He also traveled extensively in Europe, the United States, North Africa, India, Ceylon, Malaya, and Java. The most important area of his work involved unraveling the significance of the sets of tubes connecting the centers of the bodies of animals with the outside. There are nephridia, developed from the outer layer inward and serving the function of excretion. Quite different from them are coelomoducts, developed from the middle layer outward, serving to release the germ cells. These two sets of tubes may look similar when each opens into the body cavity through a funnel surrounded by cilia which create a current of fluid.
Goodrich’s attention was always focused on evolution, to which he made notable contributions, firmly adhering to Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Goodrich established that a motor nerve remains “faithful” to its corresponding segmental muscle, however much it may have become displaced or obscured in development. He showed that organs can be homologous (traceable to a single representative in a common ancestor) without arising from the same segments of the body. Like a tune in music, they can be transposed up or down the scale, for example, the fins and limbs of vertebrates and the position of the occipital arch (the back of the skull), which varies in vertebrates from the fifth to the ninth segment. He distinguished between the different structures of the scales of fishes, living and fossil, by which they are classified and recognized, a fact of fundamental importance when boring into the earth’s crust for mineral wealth because the different strata are identified by their fossils.
Membership
Goodrich was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1905. He was an honorary member of the New York Academy of Science and of many other academies.
Royal Society of London
,
United Kingdom
1905 - 1946
Personality
Goodrich's artistic training always stood him in good stead in drawing diagrams of surpassing beauty and clarity while lecturing (students used to insist on photographing the blackboard before it was erased) and in illustrating his books and papers. He also held shows of his watercolor landscapes in London.
Physical Characteristics:
A dapper, tiny, thin man with a dry sense of humor, Goodrich always complained when traveling by air that he was not weighed together with his luggage since his own weight was only half that of an average passenger.
Connections
In 1913 Goodrich married Helen Pixell, a distinguished protozoologist, who helped greatly with his work.