J P Hill Collection
James P. Hill: An Appreciation (excerpts)
By J. T. Wilson, published in Hermes, the Magazine of the University of Sydney
November 23, 1906 , pages 61-63
“The occasion of the translation of a member of our University staff to a teaching position in London of such importance as the Jodrell Chair of Zoology, deserves something more than mere casual comment.….
The problems with which Dr. Hill has very largely concerned himself, and in relation to which he has gained the most emphatic recognition are precisely some of those “peculiarly Australian problems” which induced Professor Huxley to wish that he could be appointed Professor of Natural History here.
It is now something over fourteen years since Mr. James P Hill arrived in Australia to take up the duties of Demonstrator of biology under the direction of Professor Haswell. Mr. Hill was at that time not out of his teens, and was, perhaps, the youngest who has ever received an appointment on the University staff.
From the outset of his career in Australia Mr. Hill displayed that keenness and wholehearted devotion to his work, both in teaching and research, which have been amongst his distinguishing characteristics throughout all the subsequent years. Almost from the first he displayed a bias in favor of research work on the problems of the development of the marsupials, and with a view to work of this character he early began to collect the necessary embryological material.
In this indispensable preliminary work of collection, Hill proved himself to be peculiarly gifted. Though he soon became an adept in laboratory practice he was at the same time a born collector and a genuine naturalist. Modest and unassuming to a degree, in this one matter of collecting he approximated as nearly to the quality of “pushfullness” as the possibilities of such a character permitted.
In these collecting propensities lay the roots of his researches and of their success. By his diligence and industry in this department he has gradually acquired a collection of marsupial embryological material which might lead to international complications if the versatile Kaiser were perchance to become interested in zoology.
Mr. Hill's early appointment to a teaching position had interrupted, in one sense, his academic career. It is no small testimony to his thoroughness and tenacity of purpose that he was able to detach himself temporarily from the more congenial work of research in order to complete his strictly academic curriculum in the University of Edinburgh during a brief leave of absence from Sydney . This involved the cultivation for a period of subjects which lay somewhat beyond the path which he had set himself to follow, like those of chemistry and geology. In these, too, however, he was able so to distinguish himself that he obtained his degree of Bachelor of Science with highest honors, and was awarded an important scholarship for purposes of research. A few years later he was again successful in obtaining with similar honors, his doctors degree (DSc) and was awarded a gold medal for a thesis of high excellence.
It is however on the published records of his zoological research that Dr. Hill's scientific reputation securely rests. These include a series of important papers on the development of the Marsupialia, in one of which he was able to announce the discovery, somewhat startling to zoologists, of the existence f a true allantoic placental connection in the case of the intrauterine embryo of the bandicoot (Perameles). Until then the marsupial order of mammals had been regarded, and characterised in zoological nomenclature as “aplacental”. In another paper of the same series an account was given of the discovery of the very extraordinary process by which parturition is effected in the same animal.
Dr. Hill has also contributed numerous papers on other problems of the structure and development of marsupials and monotreme to various scientific journals including the proceeding of the Royal Society of London; the Quarterly Journal of Microscopial Science; the proceeding of the Linnaean Society of New South Wales, etc."
J. T. Wilson, J. P. Hill and C.R. Martin, Laboratory at Sydney University ~ 1898. Photograph and text on file at Archives of Sydney University, Sydney, Australia.
JP Hill: An appreciation
Material in the neural crest study
The Hill embryological collection