Francis M. Balfour

Francis Maitland Balfour (1851–1882) was a British embryologist, born in Edinburgh, the younger brother of the future prime minister Arthur Balfour. At Trinity College, Cambridge, he took up the study of development under Michael Foster, worked at Naples on the embryos of sharks and rays, and published his Treatise on Comparative Embryology in 1880 and 1881, the first systematic account of the subject. Elected to the Royal Society at twenty-seven and awarded its Royal Medal, he was made professor of animal morphology at Cambridge in 1882 and died that July attempting the Aiguille Blanche de Peuterey near Mont Blanc.