William Henry Flower

Background

William Flower was born on January 30, 1831, in Stratford-upon-avon, Warwickshire, United Kingdom. He was the second son of Edward Fordham Flower, founder of the town brewery, and his wife Celina.

Education

Choosing medicine as his profession, William began his studies at University College, London, where he showed special aptitude for physiology and comparative anatomy and took his Bachelor of Medicine in 1851.

Career

Flower became a member of the surgical staff at Middlesex Hospital, London, after serving as an assistant surgeon in the Crimean War. He remained at Middlesex until late 1861 and during this period published most of his dozen and a half medical papers, including a chapter on injuries to the shoulder region in T. Holmes’s System of Surgery.

After the death of John Thomas Quekett in 1861, Flower became conservator of the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons. He held the conservatorship until 1884, when he succeeded Richard Owen as superintendent, and later director, of the Natural History Departments of the British Museum, remaining in that position until 1898.

Much of Flower’s time and effort was spent on curatorial duties for anatomy and natural history museums, and he often spoke on the aims and organization of such museums. He strongly believed in their twofold function: the education of the public by a small number of expertly presented specimens which tell a story, and the provision of comprehensive collections and related library material for further education and research by knowledgeable experts. Under Flower’s directorship the British Museum of Natural History was developed so that it closely approached this goal.

Few of Flower’s papers published before his appointment to the Hunterian conservatorship in 1861 were of a zoological nature. Of the greatest interest to Flower were the Mammalia, especially the Cetacea. A concern with problems of classification loomed large in many of his researches, and he made significant contributions to the clarification of the classification of the carnivores, rhinoceroses, and edentates. He helped considerably to consolidate the class Mammalia through two papers on the Marsupialia and Monotremata, in which he demonstrated the essentially mammalian characteristics of the marsupial dentition and the cerebral commissures of both of these aberrant groups.

Beginning in the early 1860’s the Cetacea became Flower’s prime research interest, nearly a quarter of his published works being directed toward this order. Although hampered by a shortage of information and specimens, he became recognized as the British authority on the Cetacea through his assiduous collecting of all available material. He procured many specimens, first for the Royal College of Surgeons and later for the British Museum (Natural History), and was responsible for adding the whale room at the latter, with its skeletons and life-size models. Flower described and classified many species of whales and dolphins, which he obtained either from specimens washed up on the British coast or from correspondents throughout the world. Of particular interest in this field are his “On the Osteology of the Cachalot or Sperm-whale” and his long paper “On the Characters and Divisions of the Family Delphinidae.” The latter is the most extensive of his papers on cetacean classification and was long the basis for the study of this family.

Although he was keenly interested in physical anthropology, Flower wrote only a few papers on nonhuman primates, and these were concerned chiefly with the controversy - sparked by Richard Owen in 1860 in opposition to Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and settled by T. H. Huxley - over certain characteristics of primate brains. Several papers by Flower provided strong evidence that Owen’s distinctions between human and nonhuman primate brains were invalid. While at the Hunterian Museum, he added many anthropological specimens, particularly skulls, to the collection and produced a series of papers on the osteology of various primitive tribes. As a result of his researches he adopted the division of the human species into three races - Caucasian, Mongolian, and Ethiopian - which had been proposed by Cuvier sixty years earlier.

Flower was never a teacher in the sense of having students, but he did lecture extensively, particularly as the Hunterian professor of comparative anatomy and physiology. In the introductory lecture to his first Hunterian series he stressed the idea that they should be museum lectures and that he should be a mouthpiece for the specimens. This first series was published as An Introduction to the Osteology of the Mammalia. His 1883 series was on the horse, a topic of special interest to him; he published a volume treating the evolutionary development of the horse and related species. With Richard Lydekker, Flower published a comprehensive volume on living and extinct Mammalia, which considers the evolution and classification of the mammals and their geological and geographical distribution.

Achievements

• William Flower made valuable contributions to structural anthropology, publishing, for example, complete and accurate measurements of no less than 1300 human skulls, and as a comparative anatomist he ranked high, devoting himself especially to the study of the mammalia. His ideas, which were largely and successfully applied to the museums of which he had charge, gained wide approval, and their influence entitles him to be looked upon as a reformer who did much to improve the methods of museum arrangement and management. He was created a Companion of the Order of the Bath in 1887 and a Knight of the Order of the British Empire in 1892.

Works

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  • An Introduction to the Study of Mammals Living and Extinct 1891
  • An Introduction to the Osteology of the Mammalia 1870
  • Essays On Museums and Other Subjects Connected With Natural History 1898
  • Diagrams of the Nerves of the Human Body 1861
  • Fashion in Deformity 1885
  • The horse: a study in natural history 1890

Membership

Flower was an active member of numerous scientific organizations, including the Royal Society, the Zoological Society, and the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

Connections

On 15 April 1858 at Stone in Buckinghamshire, William Flower married Georgiana Rosetta, youngest daughter of Admiral William Henry Smyth. They had seven children, including the zoologist Stanley Smyth Flower.

Father:

Edward Fordham Flower

Mother:

Celina Greaves Flower

Spouse:

Georgiana Rosetta Flower

Son:

Stanley Smyth Flower

References

• Dictionary of Scientific Biography