BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE OF SIR RICHARD OWEN[83]

Richard Owen was born at Lancaster on 20th July 1804. His father, whose name was also Richard, was engaged in business connected with the West Indies. His mother’s name was Catherine Parrin. He was educated at the Grammar School at Lancaster (where one of his schoolfellows was W. Whewell, afterwards Master of Trinity), was apprenticed to a surgeon of the name of Harrison in that town, and studied surgery at the County Hospital. No evidence can now be found for the statement which has appeared in many biographical notices that when a boy he went to sea as a midshipman, nor is there any that at a later period he had an intention to enter the medical service of the Navy, or applied for and obtained an appointment, as has also been stated.

In 1824 he matriculated at the University of Edinburgh, and had the good fortune to attend the anatomical course of Dr. Barclay, then approaching the close of a successful career as an extra-academical lecturer, whose teaching was of a very superior order to that of the third Monro, who, by virtue of hereditary influences, happened at that time to be the University Professor of Anatomy. In his work _On the Nature of Limbs_, Owen refers to “the extensive knowledge of comparative anatomy possessed by my revered preceptor in anatomy, Dr. Barclay,” and always spoke of him with affectionate regard.

He did not remain in Edinburgh to take his degree, but removed to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, and passed the examination for the membership of the Royal College of Surgeons on 18th August 1826.

His first published scientific works were in the direction of surgical pathology, being on encysted calculus, and on the effects of ligature of the internal iliac artery for the cure of aneurism.

At St. Bartholomew’s Hospital he soon attracted the attention of the celebrated Abernethy, through whose influence he obtained the appointment of Assistant Conservator to the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. This was in 1827, and it caused him to abandon the prospect of private practice, to which he had begun to devote himself while living in Serle Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, for the more congenial pursuit of comparative anatomy. The Conservator of the Museum at that time was William Clift, John Hunter’s last and most devoted pupil and assistant, under whose faithful guardianship the collection had been most carefully preserved during the long interval between the death of its founder and its transference to the custody of the College of Surgeons. From him Owen early imbibed an enthusiastic reverence for the great master, which was continually augmented with the closer study of his collection and works, which now became the principal duty of his life. In 1830 and 1831 he visited Paris, where he attended the lectures of Cuvier and Geoffroy St. Hilaire, and worked in the dissecting rooms and public galleries of the Jardin des Plantes. In 1835 he married Clift’s only daughter, Caroline, and in 1842 was associated with him as joint Conservator of the Museum. On Clift’s retirement soon after, he became sole Conservator, with Mr. J. T. Quekett as assistant.

He was appointed Hunterian Professor of Comparative Anatomy and Physiology in 1835, an office which he held until his retirement from the College in 1856, and from which he took the title of “Professor Owen,” by which he was far more widely known than by the knightly addition of his later years.

Until the year 1852, when the Queen gave him the charming cottage called Sheen Lodge, in Richmond Park, where he resided to the end of his life, he occupied small apartments within the building of the College of Surgeons; these, however inconvenient they might be in some respects, furnished him with unusual facilities for pursuing his work by night as well as day in the museum, dissecting rooms, and library of that institution.

Owen’s life of scientific activity may be divided into two periods, during each of which the nature of his work was determined to a considerable extent by the circumstances by which he was environed. Each of these periods embraces a term of very nearly thirty years. The first, from 1827 to 1856, was spent at the Royal College of Surgeons; the second, from 1856 to 1884, in the British Museum. It was in the first that he mainly made his great reputation as an anatomist, having utilised to the fullest possible extent the opportunities which were placed in his way by the care of the Hunterian Museum. For many years he worked in that institution under the happiest of auspices. From the routine and drudgery which always take up so large a portion of the time of a conscientious museum curator, he was relieved by the painstaking, methodical William Clift; the far more gifted son-in-law being thus able to throw himself to his heart’s content into the higher work of the office. This at first mainly consisted in the preparation of that monumental _Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Physiological Series of Comparative Anatomy_, founded upon Hunter’s preparations, largely added to by Owen himself, which was published in five quarto volumes between the years 1833 and 1840. This work, which has been taken as a model for many other subsequently published catalogues, contains a minute description of nearly four thousand preparations. The labour involved in preparing it was greatly increased by the circumstance that the origin of a large number of them had not been preserved, and even the species of the animals from which they were derived had to be discovered by tedious researches among old documents, or by comparison with fresh dissections. It was mainly for aid in this work that he engaged upon the long series of dissections of animals which died from time to time in the Gardens of the Zoological Society, the descriptions of which, as published in the Proceedings and Transactions of the Society, form a precious fund of information upon the comparative anatomy of the higher vertebrates. The series commences with an account of the anatomy of an orang-utan, which was communicated to the first scientific meeting of the Society, held on the evening of Tuesday, 9th November 1830, and was continued with descriptions of dissections of the beaver, suricate, acouchy, Thibet bear, gannet, crocodile, armadillo, seal, kangaroo, tapir, toucan, flamingo, hyrax, horn-bill, cheetah, capybara, pelican, kinkajou, wombat, giraffe, dugong, apteryx, wart-hog, walrus, great ant-eater, and many others.

Among the many obscure subjects in anatomy and physiology on which Owen threw much light by his researches at this period were several connected with the generation, development, and structure of the Marsupialia and Monotrema, groups which always had great interest for him. It is a curious coincidence that his first paper, communicated to the Royal Society (in 1832), “On the Mammary Glands of the _Ornithorhynchus paradoxus_,” was one of a series which only terminated in almost the last which he offered to the same Society (in 1887), being a description of a newly excluded young of the same animal, published in the _Proceedings_, vol. 42, p. 391.

On the completion of the _Catalogue of the Physiological Series_ his curatorial duties led him to undertake the catalogues of the osteological collections of recent and extinct forms. This task necessitated minute studies of the modifications of the skeleton in all vertebrated animals, and researches into their dentition, the latter being finally embodied in his great work on _Odontography_ (1840-45), in which he brought a vast amount of light out of what was previously chaotic in our knowledge of the subject, and cleared the way for all future work upon it. Although recent advances of knowledge have shown that there are difficulties in accepting the whole of Owen’s system of homologies and notation of the teeth of Mammals, it was an immense improvement upon anything of the kind which existed before, and a considerable part of it seems likely to remain a permanent addition to our means of describing these organs. The close study of the bones and teeth of existing animals was of extreme importance to him in his long continued and laborious researches into fossil forms; and, following in the footsteps of Cuvier, he fully appreciated and deeply profited by the dependence of the study of the living in elucidating the dead, and _vice versâ_. Perhaps the best example of this is to be seen in his elaborate memoir on the Mylodon, published in 1842, entitled _Description of the Skeleton of an Extinct Gigantic Sloth_ (_Mylodon robustus_, Owen), _with Observations on the Osteology, Natural Affinities, and Probable Habits of the Megatheroid Quadrupeds in General_, a masterpiece both of anatomical description and of reasoning and inference. A comparatively popular outcome of some of his work in this direction was the volume on _British Fossil Mammals and Birds_, published in 1844-46, as a companion to the works of Yarrell, Bell, and others on the recent fauna of our island. He also wrote, assisted by Dr. S. P. Woodward, the article “Palæontology” for the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, which, when afterwards published in a separate form, reached a second edition in 1861.

To this first period of his life belong the courses of Hunterian Lectures, given annually at the College of Surgeons, each year on a fresh subject, and each year the means of bringing before the world new and original discoveries which attracted, even fascinated, large audiences, and did much to foster an interest in the science among cultivated people of various classes and professions. They also added greatly to the scientific renown of the College in which they were given. To this period also belong the development and popularisation of those transcendental views of anatomy--the conception of creation according to types, and the construction of the Vertebrate archetype--views which had great attractions and even uses in their day, and which were accepted by many, at all events as working hypotheses around which facts could be marshalled, and out of which grew a methodical system, of anatomical terminology, much of which has survived to the present time. The recognition of homology and its distinction from analogy, which was so strongly insisted on by Owen, marked a distinct advance in philosophical anatomy. These generalisations, first announced in lectures at the College of Surgeons, were afterwards embodied in two works: _The Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton_ (1848), and _The Nature of Limbs_ (1849).

The contributions which Owen made to our knowledge of the structure of Invertebrate animals nearly all belong to the earlier period of his career, one of the most important being his admirable and exhaustive memoir on the Pearly Nautilus, founded on the dissection of a specimen of this, at that time exceedingly rare, animal sent to him in spirit by his friend Dr. George Bennett, of Sydney. This was illustrated by carefully executed drawings by his own hand, and published in the year 1832, when he was only twenty-seven years of age. The Cephalopoda continued to engage his attention, and the merits of a memoir on fossil Belemnites from the Oxford Clay, published in the _Philosophical Transactions_ in 1844, was the cause assigned for the award to him of the Royal Medal in 1846. He contributed the article “Cephalopoda,” to the _Cyclopædia of Anatomy and Physiology_ (1836), catalogued the extinct Cephalopoda in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons (1856), and wrote original papers on _Clavagella_ (1834), _Trichina spiralis_ (1835), _Linguatula_ (1835), _Distoma_ (1835), _Spondylus_ (1838), _Euplectella_ (1841), _Terebratula_ (in the introduction to Davidson’s classical _Monograph of the British Fossil Brachiopods_, 1853), and many other subjects, including the well-known essay on “Parthenogenesis, or the Successive Production of Procreating Individuals from a Single Ovum” (1849).

In 1843 his _Lectures on the Comparative Anatomy and Physiology of the Invertebrate Animals_, in the form of notes taken by his pupil, Mr. W. White Cooper, appeared as a separate work. Of this, a second expanded and revised edition was published in 1855. By this time, as the Royal Society’s _Catalogue of Scientific Papers_ shows, he had been the author of as many as 250 separate scientific memoirs.

In 1856, when Owen had reached the zenith of his fame, and was recognised throughout Europe as the first anatomist of the day, a change came over his career. Difficulties with the governing body of the College of Surgeons, arising from his impatience at being required to perform what he considered the lower administrative duties of his office, caused him readily to take advantage of an offer from the Trustees of the British Museum to undertake a newly-created post, that of Superintendent of the Natural History Departments of the Museum. It was thought that hitherto these departments, being under the direct control of a chief who had been invariably chosen from the literary side of the establishment, and whose title in fact was that of “Principal Librarian,” had not obtained their due share of attention in the general and financial administration, and that if they were grouped together and placed under a strong administrator, who should be able to exercise influence in advocating their claims to consideration, and who should be responsible for their internal working, their relative position in the establishment would be improved. Owen was accordingly placed in this position, and bade farewell to the College of Surgeons, its museum, and its lectures. At the British Museum, however, he encountered the difficulties which are nearly always experienced by an outsider suddenly imported into the midst of an existing establishment without any very well-defined position. The Principal Librarian, Sir A. Panizzi, was a man of strong will and despotic character, and little disposed to share any of his authority with another. The heads of the departments, especially Dr. J. E. Gray, Keeper of Zoology, preferred to maintain the independence to which they were accustomed within their own sphere of action, and to have no intermediary between them and the Trustees, except the Principal Librarian, who, though perhaps with little sympathy, had also, from lack of special knowledge, but little power of interference in detail. Hence Owen found himself in a situation the duties of which were little more than nominal, probably for him the best that could have been, as it gave his indomitable industry full play in the directions for which his talents were best fitted, and with the magnificent material in the collections of the Museum at his command, he set to work with great vigour upon a renewed series of researches, the results of which for many years taxed the resources of most of the scientific societies of London to publish. It followed from the nature of the materials that came most readily to his hand, and the smaller facilities for dissection now available than those afforded by the College of Surgeons, that his original work was henceforth mainly confined to osteology, and chiefly to that of extinct animals. The rich treasures of the palæontological department were explored, named, and described, as were also the valuable additions which poured in from various parts of the world, attracted in many cases by Owen’s great reputation. The long series of papers on the gigantic extinct Birds of New Zealand, begun in the year 1839, at the College of Surgeons, with the receipt of the fragment of a femur, upon which the first evidence of their existence was based, was now continued at intervals as fresh materials arrived.[84] The Marsupials of Australia, the Edentates of South America, the Triassic Reptiles from South Africa, the _Archæopteryx_ from Solenhofen, the Mesozoic Mammals from the Purbeck, the Aborigines of the Andaman Islands, the Cave remains, human and otherwise, of the South of France, the Cetacea of the Suffolk crag, the gorilla and other Anthropoid apes, the dodo, great auk, and _Chiromys_, and many other remarkable forms of animal life, were all subjects of elaborate memoirs from his untiring pen. These were adorned in every case with a profusion of admirable illustrations, drawn as often as possible of the full size of nature. His contributions to the publications of the Palæontographical Society, mainly upon the extinct Reptiles of the British Isles, fill more than a thousand pages, and are illustrated by nearly three hundred plates.

He now also found leisure to perform the pious duty of vindicating the scientific reputation of his great predecessor, John Hunter, by arranging and revising for publication a large collection of precious manuscripts containing records of dissections of animals and observations and reflections upon numerous subjects connected with anatomy, physiology, and natural history in general. These were published in 1861, in two closely-printed octavo volumes, entitled _Essays and Observations in Natural History, Anatomy, Physiology, Psychology, and Geology, by John Hunter, being his Posthumous Papers on those subjects_. The original manuscripts had been destroyed by Sir Everard Home in 1823, but fortunately not before William Clift had taken copies of the greater part of them, and it was from these copies that the work was compiled. Its publication shows that Hunter, while occupied with a large and anxious practice--in itself labour enough for an ordinary man--while cultivating with a passionate energy the sciences of physiology and pathology, while collecting and arranging a museum such as has never been formed before or since by a single individual, had also carefully recorded a series of dissections of different species of animals which, as his editor justly says, “if published _seriatim_, would not only have vied with the labours of Daubenton, as recorded in the _Histoire Naturelle_, of Buffon, or with the _Comparative Dissections_ of Vicq d’Azyr, which are inserted in the early volumes of the _Encyclopédie Méthodique_ and the _Mémoires de l’Académie Royale de France_, but would have exceeded them both together.”

In 1866 were published the first and second volumes, and in 1868 the third volume, of Owen’s own great book on the Anatomy and Physiology of the Vertebrates.

This is the most encyclopædic work on the subject accomplished by any one individual since Cuvier’s _Leçons d’Anatomie Comparée_, and contains an immense mass of information mainly based upon original observations and dissections. It is in fact a collection of nearly all his previous memoirs arranged in systematic order, generally in the very words in which they were originally written, and unfortunately sometimes without the revision which advances made in the subject by the labours of others would have rendered desirable. Very little of the classification adopted in this work, either the primary division of the Vertebrates into Hæmatocrya and Hæmatotherma, or the divisions into classes and sub-classes, has been accepted by other zoologists. The division of the Mammalia into four sub-classes of equivalent value, upheld by Owen, not only in this work, but in various other publications issued about the same time (Rede Lecture, etc.), founded upon cerebral characteristics, was especially open to criticism. Though the separation of the Monotremes and Marsupials from all the others as a distinct group (Lyencephala) is capable of vindication, the three other sub-classes, Lissencephala, Gyrencephala, and Archencephala, grade so imperceptibly into each other that their distinction as sub-classes cannot be maintained. The proposed definition of the distinguishing characters of the brain of Man (Archencephala) from that of other Mammals gave rise to a somewhat acute controversy, the echoes of which reached beyond the realms of purely scientific literature. On the other hand, the radical distinction between the two groups of Ungulates, the odd-toed and the even-toed, first indicated by Cuvier, when treating of the fossil forms, was thoroughly worked out by Owen through every portion of their organisation, and remains as a solid contribution to a rational system of classification.

The chapter called “General Conclusions” at the end of the third volume is devoted to a summary of his views on the principal controverted biological questions of the day, especially in relation to the teaching of Darwin, just then coming into great prominence. Although from the peculiarly involved style of Owen’s writing, especially upon these subjects, it is sometimes difficult to define his real opinions, it appears that before the publication of the _Origin of Species_, he had “been led to recognise species as exemplifying the continuous operation of natural law, or secondary cause, and that not only successively but progressively.” Darwin’s special doctrine of “natural selection,” however, he never appreciated, and his strong opposition to it caused him, though quite erroneously, to be looked upon by those outside the world of science as a supporter of the old-fashioned and then more “orthodox” view of special creation. His most distinct utterance upon this subject is contained in the following paragraph: “So, being unable to accept the volitional hypothesis, or that of impulse from within, or the selective force exerted by outward circumstances, I deem an innate tendency to deviate from parental type, operating through periods of adequate duration, to be the most probable nature, or way of operation, of the secondary law, whereby species have been derived one from the other.” (_Op. cit._ vol. iii. p. 807.)

His career as a lecturer did not entirely cease with his connection with the College of Surgeons, as, by permission of the authorities of the Museum of Practical Geology in Jermyn Street, he gave several courses on the fossil remains of animals, in the theatre of that institution, and he held in the years 1859, 1860, and 1861, in conjunction with his office at the British Museum, the Fullerian Professorship of Physiology in the Royal Institution. On the revival of the annual lecture on Sir Robert Rede’s foundation in the University of Cambridge, in 1859, he was appointed to give the first, and took for his subject the Classification of the Mammalia. He also occasionally lectured at the Royal Institution on Friday evenings, his last appearance there being on 26th April 1861, when he delivered the discourse, “On the Scope and Appliances of a National Museum of Natural History,” to be presently referred to. In April 1862 he gave four lectures on Birds at the London Institution.

While at the College of Surgeons he had been a member of a Government Commission for inquiring into the health of the Metropolis; and subsequently (1849) of one on Smithfield and the other meat markets, in which he strongly advocated the entire suppression of intramural slaughter-houses, and the concomitant evil of the passage of droves of sheep and cattle through the streets of London. For the Great Exhibition of 1851 he was on the Preliminary Committee of Organisation, and he acted as chairman of the jury on raw materials, alimentary substances, etc., and published an elaborate report on their awards. He also delivered to the Society of Arts a lecture on “Raw Animal Products, and their Uses in Manufacture.” Similar services were performed by him for the Exposition Universelle of Paris in 1858.

It has been already said that Owen took scarcely any part in the details of the administration of the British Museum, but one subject relating to that establishment did largely engage his attention from his first connection with it. That the accommodation afforded by the rooms devoted to natural history in the Museum at Bloomsbury was painfully inadequate for the purpose was evident to him as well as to every one else. Space must be obtained somewhere, even for the proper conservation and display of the existing collections, to say nothing of the vast additions that must be expected if the subject were to be represented in anything like the way in which it deserved to be in his eyes, and Owen in this respect had very large views. The scientific public, the officers of the Museum, and the Trustees, were much divided as to whether it would be better to endeavour to obtain this space in the neighbourhood of the existing Museum, or to remove a portion of the collection to a totally distinct locality. After some apparent hesitation, Owen threw himself strongly on the side of those who took the latter view, being the one which seemed to him to have the best chance of leading to a successful result, and he strongly urged upon the Government, and upon the public generally, in annual museum returns, lectures, and pamphlets, the desirability of the scheme. In his address as President of the Biological Section of the British Association at the York meeting in 1881, he has given a history of the part he took in promoting the building of the new museum at South Kensington, including his success in enlisting the sympathy of Mr. Gladstone, by whose powerful aid the difficulties and opposition with which the plan was met in Parliament were mainly overcome. His earlier views upon the subject are fully explained in a small work entitled _On the Extent and Aims of a National Museum of Natural History_, published in 1862, being an expansion of the lecture he gave at the Royal Institution in the previous year. Much controversy arose about this time as to the best principle of museum organisation, Owen adhering to the old view of a public exhibition on a very extensive scale, while the greater number of naturalists of the time preferred the system of dividing the collections into a comparatively limited public exhibition, the bulk of the specimens being kept in a manner accessible only to the researches of advanced students. The Royal Commission on the Advancement of Science, of which the late Duke of Devonshire was chairman, investigated the subject fully, and reported (in 1874) in favour of the latter view; but in the new building in the Cromwell Road there was, unfortunately, little provision made for carrying it out in a satisfactory manner.

As long ago as 1859, in one of his reports on the subject to the Trustees, Owen recommended that the new museum building, “besides giving the requisite accommodation to the several classes of natural history objects, as they had been by authority exhibited and arranged for public instruction and gratification, should also include a hall or exhibition space for a distinct department, adapted to convey an elementary knowledge of the subjects of all the divisions of natural history to the large proportion of public visitors not specially conversant with any of those subjects.” The same idea, in a later publication, is thus described: “One of the most popular and instructive features in a public collection of natural history would be an apartment devoted to the specimens selected to show type-characters of the principal groups of organised and crystallised forms. This would constitute an epitome of natural history, and should convey to the eye, in the easiest way, an elementary knowledge of the sciences.” In every modification which the plans of the new building underwent, a hall for the purpose indicated in the above passages formed a prominent feature, being in the later stages of the development of the building, called, for want of a better name, the “Index Museum.” Though Owen gave the suggestion and designed the general plan of the hall, the arrangement of its contents was left to his successor to carry out.

In another part of his original scheme he was less successful. The lecture theatre, which he had throughout urged with great pertinacity as a necessary accompaniment to a natural history museum, was, as he says in the address referred to above, “erased from my plan, and the elementary courses of lectures remain for future fulfilment.”

On several other important questions of museum arrangement Owen allowed his views, even when essentially philosophical as well as practical, to be overruled. As long ago as December 1841, he submitted to the Museum Committee of the Royal College of Surgeons the question of incorporating in one catalogue and system of arrangement the fossil bones of extinct animals with the specimens of recent osteology, and shortly afterwards laid before the Committee a report pointing out the advantages of such a plan. Strangely enough, though receiving the formal approval of the Council, no steps were taken to carry it out as long as he was at the College. He returned to the question in reference to the arrangement of the new National Museum, and although no longer advocating so complete an incorporation of the two series, apparently in consideration of the interests of the division into “departments” which he found in existence there, he says, “The department of Zoology in such a museum should be so located as to afford the easiest transit from the specimens of existing to those of extinct animals. The geologist specially devoted to the study of the evidence of extinct vegetation ought, in like manner, to have means of comparing his fossils with the collections of recent plants.”[85] Provision for such an arrangement is clearly indicated in all the early plans for the building, in which the space for the different subjects is allocated, but not a trace of it remained in the final disposition of the contents of the museum, as Owen left it in 1883.

Another essential feature of Owen’s original plan, without which, he says, “No collection of zoology can be regarded as complete,” is a gallery of physical ethnology, the size of which he estimated (in 1862) at 150 ft. in length by 50 ft. in width. It was to contain casts of the entire body, coloured after life, of characteristic parts as the head and face, skeletons of every variety arranged side by side for facility of comparison, the brain preserved in spirit showing its characteristic size and distinctive structures, etc. “The series of zoology,” he says, “would lack its most important feature were the illustrations of the physical characters of the human race to be omitted.”

An adequate exhibition of the Cetacea, both by means of stuffed specimens and skeletons, also always formed a prominent element in his demand for space. “Birds, shells, minerals,” he wrote, “are to be seen in any museum; but the largest, strangest, rarest specimens of the highest class of animals can only be studied in the galleries of a national one.” And again: “If a national museum does not afford the naturalist the means of comparing the Cetacea, we never shall know anything about these most singular and anomalous animals.”

When, however, the contents of the museum were finally arranged, nominally under his direction, physical anthropology was only represented by a few skeletons and skulls placed in a corner of the great gallery devoted to the osteology of the Mammalia, and the fine series of Cetacean skeletons could only be accommodated in a most unsuitable place for exhibition in a part of the basement not originally destined for any such purpose. The truth is that the division of the museum establishment into four distinct departments, each with its own head, left the “superintendent” practically powerless, and Owen’s genius did not lie in the direction of such a re-organisation as might have been effected during the critical period of the removal of the collections from Bloomsbury and their installation in the new building. Advancing age, also, probably indisposed him to encounter the difficulties which inevitably arise from interference with time-honoured traditions. At length, at the close of the year 1883, being in his eightieth year, he asked to be relieved from the responsibilities of an office the duties of which he had practically ceased to perform.

The nine remaining years of his life were spent in peaceful retirement at Sheen Lodge, an ideal residence for one who had such a keen enjoyment of the charms of Nature in every form, for, though so large a portion of his active life had been passed among dry bones, anatomical specimens, microscopes, and books, he retained a genuine love for out-door natural history, and the sight of the deer and other animals in the park, the birds and insects in the garden, the trees, flowers, and varying aspects of the sky, filled him with enthusiastic admiration. He also had his library around him, and it is needless to say that the habit of strenuous work never deserted him till failing memory and bodily infirmity made it no longer possible to continue that flow of contributions to scientific literature which had never ceased during a period of sixty-two years, his first and last papers being dated respectively 1826 and 1888. His wife and only child had died some time before, but the son (who had held an appointment in the Foreign Office) left a widow and seven children, who, coming to reside with him at Sheen, completely relieved his latter days of the solitude in which they would otherwise have been passed. During the autumn of 1892 his strength gradually failed, and he died on the 18th of December, literally of old age. In accordance with his own expressed desire, he was buried in the churchyard of Ham, near Richmond, in the same grave with his wife, a large and representative assemblage of men of science being present at the funeral ceremony.

It may be thought that the prodigious amount of work that Owen did in his special subjects would have left him no time for any other occupations or relaxations, but this was by no means the case. He was a great reader of poetry and romance, and, being gifted with a wonderful memory, could repeat by heart, even in his old age, page after page of Milton and other favourite authors. For music he had a positive passion; in the most busy period of his life he might constantly be seen at public concerts, listening with rapt attention, and in his earlier days was himself no mean vocalist, and acquired considerable proficiency in playing the violincello. He was also a neat and careful draughtsman; the large number of anatomical sketches he left behind him testify to his industry in this direction. His handwriting was unusually clear and finished, considering the vast quantity of manuscript that flowed from his pen, for he rarely resorted to dictation or any labour-saving process. Only those who have had to clear out rooms, official or private, which have been long occupied by him can have any idea of the quantity of memoranda and extracts which he made with his own hand, and most of the books he was in the habit of using were filled with notes and comments.

Owen’s was a very remarkable personality, both physically and mentally. He was tall but ungainly in figure, with massive head, lofty forehead, curiously round, prominent, and expressive eyes, high cheek bones, large mouth and projecting chin, long, lank, dark hair, and during the greater part of his life, smooth-shaven face, and very florid complexion. Though in his general intercourse with others usually possessed of much of the ceremonial courtesy of the old school, and when in congenial society a delightful companion, owing to his unfailing flow of anecdote, considerable sense of humour, and strongly-developed faculty of imagination, he was not only an extremely adroit controversialist, but could say as hard things as any one of an adversary or rival. It was to Owen’s many-sided and very complex character that the remarkably different estimates formed of him personally by his contemporaries was due. Unfortunately he was often engaged in controversy, a circumstance which led to a comparative isolation in his position among men who followed kindred pursuits, which was doubtless painful to himself as well as to others. It was this, combined with a certain inaptitude for ordinary business affairs, which was the cause of his never having been called to occupy several of the distinguished official positions in science to which his immense labours and brilliant talents would otherwise have fairly entitled him. Over the British Association he presided at the meeting at Leeds in 1858, and he had his full share of those honours and dignities to which a scientific man can aspire which involve no corresponding duties or responsibilities. He was made a C.B. in 1873, and a K.C.B. on his retirement from the Museum in 1884. He received the Prussian Order “Pour le Mérite” in 1851, the Cross of the French Legion of Honour in 1855, and was also decorated by the King of Italy with the Order of St. Maurice and St. Lazarus, and by the Emperor of Brazil with the Order of the Rose. He was chosen one of the eight foreign Associates of the Institute of France in 1859. The Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Dublin conferred upon him their honorary degrees, and he was an honorary or corresponding member of nearly every important scientific society in the world. The Geological Society presented him with the Wollaston Medal in 1838, and the Royal College of Surgeons with its Honorary Gold Medal in 1883. He was the first to receive the gold medal established by the Linnean Society at the centenary meeting of that body in 1888. The Royal Society, of which he became a Fellow in December 1834, and on the Council of which he served for five separate periods, awarded him one of the Royal Medals in 1846, and the Copley Medal in 1851.