Edwin Ray Lankester

Sir Edwin Ray Lankester was a British zoologist, born on 15 May 1847 in London, an invertebrate zoologist and evolutionary biologist who held chairs at University College London and Oxford University. He was the son of Edwin Lankester, a coroner and doctor-naturalist who helped eradicate cholera in London, and the botanist and author Phebe Lankester, and was probably named after the naturalist John Ray. He went to boarding school at Leatherhead and then to St Pauls School, and his university education was at Downing College, Cambridge, and Christ Church, Oxford. He became a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, in 1873, was a founder in 1884 of the Marine Biological Association and its second President from 1890 to 1929, and was the third Director of the Natural History Museum in London. He was awarded the Copley Medal of the Royal Society and was elected an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1902.