Key Information
Reference code
Title
Date(s)
- [1917-1972] (Creation)
Level of description
Collection
Extent
2 boxes and 2 large folders
Scope and content
The papers of Professor Sir Gavin Rylands De Beer comprise notebooks, typescript lecture texts and photographs, [1917-1947]; notably including four manuscript notebooks containing summaries of lectures attended by De Beer when he was an undergraduate and fellow at Oxford, consisting of notes on rudimentary embryology and zoology with sketches and bibliographies, [1917-1938]; proofs and fair copies of the text of De Beer's anniversary lecture as President of the Linnean Society on animal posture and morphology with photographs and drawings, [1947]; transparencies used in a talk on evolution, [1947]; microscopy photographs of the embryonic development of monotremes and marsupials and, at the cellular level, of the salamander, [1945-1972]; photographs and plaster casts of the brain case and other parts of a fossilised specimen of the bird-like Archaeopteryx, [1950-1960]; photographs of cross sections through a mature tree showing growth rings, [1950-1960].
System of arrangement
The collection is arranged into notebooks, lecture texts and photographs as shown in Scope and Content.
General Information
Name of creator
Biographical history
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).
Repository
Custodial history
Chelsea College Library.
Conditions governing access
Open, subject to signature of Reader's undertaking form, and appropriate provision of two forms of identification, to include one photographic ID.
Conditions governing reproduction
Copies, subject to the condition of the original, may be supplied from open material for research purposes only.
Requests to publish original material should be submitted to the Archives.
Language of material
- English
Script of material
Related materials
Alternative identifier(s)
Place access points
People and Organisations
- Linnean Society of London (Subject)
Genre access points
Rules and/or conventions used
Compiled in compliance with General International Standard Archival Description, ISAD(G), second edition, 2000.
Script(s)
Archivist's note
Sources: Who's Who, Dictionary of National Biography. Entry compiled by Geoff Browell as part of the RSLP AIM25 Project.