Francis Maitland Balfour - Life

Life

The younger brother of the politician, Arthur Balfour, he was born at Edinburgh in Scotland. He attended Harrow School, where he showed no outstanding ability. However, one of the masters, George Griffith, encouraged and aided him in the pursuit of natural science, a taste for which, especially geology, he had acquired from his mother. Entering Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1870, he was elected a natural science scholar of his college in the following year, and obtained second place in the Natural Science Tripos of December 1873.

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