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GOODRICH, EDWIN STEPHEN (b. Weston-super-Mare,
England, 21 June 1868; d. Oxford, England,
6 January 1946), comparative anatomy, embryology,
paleontology, evolution.
Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England.
Goodrich's branch of the family under John Goodrich
came to New England in 1630, and settled at Nansewood,
Virginia, in 1635. In 1775 the then John Goodrich
returned to England, and with Goodrich's death
this branch of the family became extinct. 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, France, where he attended
the local English school and a French lycée. 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. When Lankester became 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.
In 1913 Goodrich married Helen L. M. Pixell, a
distinguished protozoologist, who helped greatly with
his work. His 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. Goodrich
was elected fellow of the Royal Society in 1905
and received its Royal Medal in 1936. He was honorary
member of the New York Academy of Science
and of many other academies, and honorary doctor
of many universities. In 1945 L. S. Berg of Leningrad
sent him a message through Julian Huxley: “Please
tell him [Goodrich] that though neither I nor my
colleagues have ever met him, we all regard ourselves
as his pupils.” A dapper, tiny, thin man with a dry
sense of humor, he 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.
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 structures may acquire
spurious visual similarity when each opens into the
body cavity through a funnel surrounded by cilia
which create a current of fluid. In some groups the
nephridia may disappear (as in vertebrates, where the
nephridia may have been converted into the thymus
gland), and the coelomoducts then take on the additional
function of excretion. This is why man has a
genitourinary system. Before Goodrich's analysis, the
whole subject was in chaos.
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. Goodrich's attention was always
focused on evolution, to which he made notable contributions,
firmly adhering to Darwin's theory of natural
selection.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
I. ORIGINAL WORKS.
A complete bibliography of
Goodrich's writings is in the obituary by de Beer (see
below). His books include Cyclostomes and Fishes (London,
1909); Living Organisms: An Account of Their Origin and
Evolution (London, 1924); and Studies on the Structure and
Development of Vertebrates (London, 1930).
II. SECONDARY LITERATURE.
On Goodrich and his work,
see Gavin de Beer, “Edwin Stephen Goodrich,” in Obituary
Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society of London,5 (1947),
477-490; and A. C. Hardy, “Edwin Stephen Goodrich,”
in Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science,87 (1947),
317-355.