William Benjamin Carpenter was an English physician, invertebrate zoologist and physiologist. He formulated the theory of ocean circulation.
Background
Carpenter was born on October 29, 1813 in Exeter, England, the eldest son of Dr Lant Carpenter and his wife, Anna Carpenter (née Penn). His sister Mary was founder of the ragged school movement, and his younger brother, Philip Pearsall, was noted as a conchologist.
Education
Carpenter attended his father’s school at Bristol and was apprenticed to John Bishop Estlin, a medical practitioner of that city. After traveling to the West Indies as companion to a patient, he enrolled at University College, London, and became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1835 and M.D. at Edinburgh in 1839.
From 1840 to 1844 Carpenter worked in Bristol as a medical practitioner; in the latter year he moved to London, gave up medicine, and devoted the remainder of his life to research. In 1845 Carpenter became Fullerian professor of physiology at the Royal Institution, professor of forensic medicine at University College, and lecturer in physiology at the London Hospital. He was made fellow of the Royal Society in 1844 and was Royal Medalist in 1861. From 1856 to 1879 he was registrar of London University: upon retirement from this post he became a member of the Senate of that university and was created Companion of the Order of the Bath. He staunchly maintained his Unitarian views and wrote many articles on topics in which science touches religion, including one on Charles Darwin, and on teetotalism.
From 1839, when he qualified in medicine, Carpenter’s output of writing on physiology, and later on zoology, was prodigious. Among early works was his graduation thesis, The Physiological Inferences to Be Deduced From the Structure of the Nervous System in the Invertebrate Classes of Animals {1839), noteworthy for its new ideas on the function of the ventral cord ganglia of the Arthropoda and for its translation by the physiologist Johannes Müller in 1840. Also in 1839 Carpenter published his Principles of General and Comparative Physiology, which went to four editions by 1854. From this work he developed further penetrating works on the physiology of man and animals. In particular, his Principles of Mental Physiology (1874) introduced new ideas on the working of nervous mechanisms and launched its author into the controversy.
Carpenter’s compromise in the face of the main scientific dilemma of his day is found in his ambivalent acceptance of natural selection, which he saw as modifying an ordained creative process. His acceptance and criticism of Darwinism are well shown in an essay review on the Origin of Species in the British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review, of which he was editor. His realization of the brilliance of Darwin’s work was unequivocal; but although it extended to agreement with the detail of selection, he displayed an inability to reconcile the full implications of descent with his basic religious beliefs.
In the 1850’s Carpenter moved into microscopy and zoology; his book The Microscope and Its Revelations reached its eighth edition in 1901. His chief work, however, lay in his encouragement of and scientific contributions to marine zoology. Of particular note are his descriptions and classification of the Foraminifera, both fossil and recent, as exemplified by four papers in the Philosophical Transactions and the splendidly illustrated monograph produced by the Ray Society in 1862. Later investigators have modified his classification of these interesting organisms, but his original work on their morphology is still quoted. Although the study of the Foraminifera has become more specialized and regionalized, owing largely to their importance to the petroleum industry, it is to the pioneering efforts of scientists like Carpenter that much of such modern industrial application is due. The interest in marine study led to a most productive association with Charles Wyville Thomson, professor of natural history at the University of Edinburgh. Between 1868 and 1871 they took part in dredging cruises off Scotland and Ireland, which led to publications on the Crinoidea; but it was the voyage of H.M.S. Challenger (1873-1876), suggested by the Royal Society and organized by the British government, that threw much new light on so many aspects of oceanography. Advancing years probably prevented Carpenter from active participation, although he was greatly concerned in the preparations for the three-year circumnavigation. Thomson was appointed to organize the report on the voyage, which appeared in fifty volumes (1880-1895). Carpenter did not himself contribute. The article on the Foraminifera (1884) came from Henry Bowman Brady, an earlier collaborator of Carpenter’s, while the latter’s son, Philip Herbert, wrote (1888) the paper on the Comatulae (feather stars), a subject upon which the father had previously published a paper.
Carpenter was a founder member of the Marine Biological Association and was closely associated with the establishment of its important marine research laboratory on Plymouth Sound. His deep-sea investigations led also to an interest in marine physics, and he developed a pioneer doctrine of general oceanic circulation in a paper to the Royal Society. Among other papers read to the society was an important series on the animal nature of Eozoon canadense, although his conclusions have since been shown to be incorrect.
Carpenter died on November 19, 1885, in London, England.
Carpenter identified as a rationalist and a Unitarian. Although critical of spiritualism, he was interested in the subject of "thought reading." He defended the mentalist Washington Irving Bishop who he had experimented with and considered such feats to be of great interest to the study of physiology.
Connections
In 1840, Carpenter married Louisa Powell in Bristol. They had 2 sons.