Goodrich, Edwin Stephen

(b. Weston-super-Mare, England, 21 June 1868; d. Oxford, England, 6 January 1946)

comparative anatomy, embryology, paleontology, evolution.

Goodrich was a son of Rev. Octavius Pitt Goodrich and Frances Lucinda Parker. Among his forebears was Thomas Goodrich, bishop of Ely and lord high chancellor of England, who helped to draw up the 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 çoelomoducts, 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.

Gavin De Beer