Konstantin Davydov

Born Dec. 18 (30), 1877, in Zubtsov, in present-day Kalinin Oblast; died July 21, 1960, in Sceaux, near Paris. Zoologist and em-briologist.

Davydov graduated from the natural sciences division of the University of St. Petersburg in 1901, where he had been a student of A. O. Kovalevskii. He was a privatdocent at the University of St. Petersburg, a professor at the University of Perm, and an official of the Lesgaft Institute of Natural Sciences in St. Petersburg. He traveled through Syria, Palestine, Indonesia, and the north of European Russia (Olonets Krai). Beginning in 1923 he worked in France and Indochina; in 1949 he became a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences in Paris. He studied experimentally the phenomenon of regeneration in ophiuroids, enteropneusts, and nemer-tines; among the latter animals he established the possibility of regeneration of the intestine from nonintestinal fragments of the body (1915). Davydov was the author of works on the zoogeography and embryology of the marine and terrestrial invertebrates of Indochina. He also published In the Islands of the Indo- Australian Archipelago (1904–06), A Course in Invertebrate Embryology (1914; reissued in expanded form in French, 1928), and a number of chapters on embryology in the multivolume French Guide to Zoology, edited by P. P. Grasse (1959).