Filippo De Filippi (1814–67)

Italian zoologist, embryologist, and geologist. Professor of zoology and director of the Museum of Zoology, Turin, 1847. Travelled as naturalist with a diplomatic and scientific mission to Persia in 1862; with a scientific voyage of global circumnavigation, 1865–7. Advocated belief in a limited transmutation of species in 1855. His lecture "Man and the Monkeys", delivered in Turin in January 1864, initiated the public debate on Darwin’s work in Italy.