Abstract
AFTER a short illness Dr. J. Barnard Davis died last week at his residence at Hanley, Staffordshire, being about eighty years of age. In the summer of 1820, while still a student, he made a voyage to the Arctic regions in the capacity of surgeon to a whaling ship. In 1823 he became a licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries; twenty years later he passed the College of Surgeons, and in 1862 took the M.D. degree of the University of St. Andrew's. In 1868 he was elected into the Royal Society. Soon after obtaining his first qualification he settled down in the Potteries, and but for what he describes, in the preface to his “Thesaurus Craniorum”, as “an accidental conversation with a friend”, might have remained through life leading the useful but uneventful life of thousands of general practitioners in the country, unknown beyond his immediate sphere of work. That accidental conversation however lighted up some smouldering embers of an interest which long before had been kindled by the lectures of Lawrence on the Natural History of Man, and led to the researches which resulted in the publication (in conjunction with the late Dr. Thurnam) of the “Crania Britannica,” or delineations and descriptions of the skulls of the aboriginal and early inhabitants of the British Islands, illustrated with sixty-seven beautifully-executed lithographic plates, completed in 1856. Besides this Dr. Davis published many memoirs on anthropological subjects, including one “On Synostotic Crania among Aboriginal Races of Man”, one on “The Osteology of the Tasmanians,” one on “The Peculiar Crania of the Inhabitants of Certain Groups of Islands in the Western Pacific,” and one published in the Philosophical Transactions for 1868, “On the Weight of the Brain in different Races of Man.”
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F., W. Joseph Barnard Davis . Nature 24, 82–83 (1881). https://doi.org/10.1038/024082a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/024082a0