Beer , Sir , Gavin Rylands De , 1899-1972 , Knight , Embryologist

Born 1899; educated at the Ecole Pascal, Paris, Harrow School and Magdalen College, Oxford, 1917; Grenadier Guards and Army Education Scheme, 1918-1919; Magdalen, 1919-1921; graduated with Zoology degree in 1921; fellow of Merton College, 1923-1938; taught in the University Zoology Department until 1938; reader in embryology, University College London, 1938; Professor, 1945-1950; World War Two work in intelligence, propaganda and psychological warfare; Fellow of the Royal Society, 1940; President of the Linnean Society, 1946-1949; Director of the British Museum (Natural History), 1950-1960; knighted, 1954; retired, 1960; lived in Switzerland, 1965-1971; died 1972. Publications: Growth (London, 1924); Early travellers in the Alps (London, 1930); Vertebrate zoology (London, 1932); An introduction to experimental embryology (Oxford, 1934); De Beer and Julian Sorell Huxley, Elements of experimental embryology (Cambridge, 1934); The development of the vertebrate skull (Oxford, 1937); edited, Evolution. Essays on aspects of evolutionary biology presented to Professor E S Goodrich on his seventieth birthday (Oxford, 1938); Alps and elephants. Hannibal's march (London, 1955); Darwin's Journal (London, 1959); edited Darwin's notebooks on transmutation of species (London, 1960); Charles Darwin: evolution by natural selection (London, 1963); Atlas of evolution (London, 1964); Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his world (London, 1972).