A scientific naturalist who lived in England in the second quarter of this present century may be accounted a fortunate man. On the one hand was the vast field of the universe, undivided, unallotted; on the other, a public eager for instruction. At the present day, when men go to and fro, and knowledge is increased, we find it hard to realize the isolation of England until after the close of the great war, or the fear of invasion that absorbed men’s thoughts until after Trafalgar. That fear removed, the modern development of the nation began. The number of those who resorted to the Universities increased by leaps and bounds. Public school life, as we understand it, was developed. As a natural consequence, the flower of the English youth were no longer content with the knowledge that had satisfied their fathers and grandfathers. The old paths were too narrow for them. The convulsions which had shaken the continent had not been without their effect even here; and when Europe was again open, account had to be taken of the work of continental thinkers. Their achievements must be mastered, continued, developed. It was allowed on all hands, except by that small class who can neither learn nor forget, that the time for a new departure in scientific education had arrived. It was the good fortune of Richard Owen to be ready just when he was wanted, to take occasion by the hand, and to become the leader in biological research.

How did he effect this? How did a young man, launched on the great world of London with no powerful connexions,

To take a metaphor from our representative system, Owen was the member for biological science in the parliament of letters for nearly half a century. And yet he was not a great thinker; his name is not associated with any far-reaching generalization, or any theory fruitful of wide results. As a comparative anatomist, and as a paleontologist, he did plenty of good and solid work. But these pursuits are most commonly those of a recluse. The man who engages in them must be content, as a general rule, with the four walls of his laboratory, and the applause of a small circle of experts. Not so Professor Owen, as he was most commonly designated, even after he had received knighthood. He contrived to lead an essentially public life; to be seen everywhere; to have his last paper talked about in fashionable drawing-rooms quite as much as in learned societies. How did he effect this? We think that the answer to our question is to be found—first, in the general eagerness for scientific instruction which was one of the characteristics of the age in which he lived; and, secondly, in his own many-sidedness. He was by no means one of those authors ‘who are all author,’ against whom Byron launched some of his most brilliant sarcasms. He was a man of science; but he was also a polished gentleman of varied accomplishments.

It is to be regretted that such a man has not found a biographer more competent than his grandson and namesake; but the reader who reaches the end of the second volume will be rewarded by a masterly essay by Mr Huxley on Owen’s place in science. This is a remarkable composition; not merely for what it says, but for what it does not say; and we recommend those who would understand it thoroughly, not merely to read it more than once, but to cultivate the useful art of reading between the lines. Of a very different nature to The Life of Owen is the article which Sir W. H. Flower has contributed to the Dictionary of National Biography. It is of necessity much compressed, but it contains all that is really essential for the proper comprehension of Owen’s scientific career, and praise and blame are meted out with calm impartiality. For ourselves, we have a sincere admiration for Owen, but an admiration which does not exclude a readiness to admit that he had defects. In what we are about to say we do not propose to draw a fancy portrait. If we nothing extenuate, we shall set down naught in malice. In a word, we shall try to present him as he was, not as he might have been.

Richard Owen was born at Lancaster, 20 July, 1804. His father was a West India merchant; his mother, Catherine Parrin, was descended from a French Huguenot family. She is said to have been a woman of refinement and intelligence, with great skill in music, a talent which she transmitted to her son. In appearance she was handsome and Spanish-looking, with dark eyes and hair. Owen delighted to dwell on his mother’s charm of manner, and all that he owed to her early training and example. We can well believe this, and the Life is full of touching references to her solicitude for her darling son. The interest she felt in all that he did even led her to read through his scientific papers and his catalogue of the Hunterian collection, with what profit to herself we are not informed. Her husband died in 1809; but the family seem to have been left in fairly affluent circumstances, and continued to live, as before, at Lancaster. Owen’s education began at the grammar-school there in 1810, when he was six years old, and ended in 1820, when he was apprenticed to a local surgeon. Of his schooldays but little record has been preserved. One of the masters described him as lazy and impudent; he is said to have had no fondness for study of any kind except heraldry; and his sister used to relate that as a boy he was ‘very small and slight, and exceedingly mischievous.’

Those who value the records of boyhood for the sake of traces of the tastes which made the man celebrated, will be rewarded by the perusal of the pages which record Owen’s four years as a surgeon’s apprentice at Lancaster. Not only will they find that he worked diligently at the curative side of his profession, but that, his master being surgeon to the gaol, he had the opportunity of attending post-mortem examinations, and so laid the foundation of his knowledge of the structure of the human frame. Here too we catch a glimpse of the future comparative anatomist; but the story of ‘The Negro’s Head,’ here given in the words used by Owen when he told it himself, is unfortunately too long for quotation, and is certainly far too good to be spoilt by abbreviation.

In October 1824 Owen matriculated at the University of Edinburgh. There, in addition to the courses that were obligatory, he attended the ‘outside’ lectures in comparative anatomy delivered by Dr John Barclay. From these he derived the greatest benefit, and used in after-years to speak of Barclay with affectionate regard, as ‘my revered preceptor.’ It is noteworthy that, while at Edinburgh, Owen and one of his friends founded a students’ society, which at his suggestion was called, by a sort of prophetic instinct, the Hunterian Society. Barclay must have decided very quickly that he had to do with no common pupil, for at the end of April 1825, when Owen had been barely six months in Edinburgh, he advised him to move to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, and study under Dr. Abernethy, then near the close of his brilliant but eccentric career. Armed with a letter of introduction from Barclay, Owen set out for London, where he had ‘literally not one single friend.’ No wonder that he felt ‘an indescribable sense of desolation’ as he walked up Holborn, and that ‘the number of strange faces that kept passing by increased that feeling.’ What happened next is very characteristic of the strange mixture of roughness and kindness which was natural to his new patron.

‘Abernethy had just finished lecturing, and was evidently in anything but the best of tempers, being surrounded by a small crowd of students waiting about to ask him questions. Owen was just screwing up his courage to attack this formidable personage and state his business, when Abernethy suddenly turned upon him and said: “And what do you want?” After presenting the letter Abernethy glanced at it for a moment, stuffed it into his pocket, and vouchsafed the gracious reply of “Oh!” As this did not seem to point to anything very definite, Owen was turning to go, when Abernethy called after him: “Here; come to breakfast to-morrow morning at eight,” and presenting him with his card, added, “That’s my address.” What were the terms in which Dr Barclay had spoken of him Owen never knew, but he thought they must have been favourable, for when he presented himself next morning at Abernethy’s residence, and was anticipating anything but an agreeable tÊte-À-tÊte with the great doctor, he found him, to his surprise, considerably smoothed down and quite pleasant in his manner. The result of the meeting was that Abernethy offered him the post of prosector for his lectures’ (i. 30).

A year later (August 18, 1826) Owen obtained the membership of the College of Surgeons, and set up as a medical practitioner in Carey Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where he gradually obtained a small practice among lawyers.

We have no wish to underrate Owen’s brilliant talents, or his perseverance, or his power of sustained work with a definite end in view; but at the same time it would be absurd to deny that he had good-fortune to thank for a large part of his first successes. What else made Abernethy, at their first interview, give him just the appointment best calculated to bring his peculiar gifts into the light of day? What else made the same patron procure his appointment, two years later, as assistant-conservator of the Hunterian collections, out of which all his future celebrity was developed? He might have been ‘exceedingly well informed in all that relates to his profession, an excellent anatomist, and sober and sedate very far beyond any young man I ever knew,’ as one who was in a position to know said of him in 1830, and yet have ‘bloomed unseen,’ an obscure practitioner in ‘the dusky purlieus of the law,’ had not the fickle goddess selected him as the special recipient of her favours.

Owen’s active life in London divides itself naturally into two periods, each containing nearly thirty years. The first, during which he was connected with the Royal College of Surgeons, extended from 1827 to 1856; the second, during which he was nominally superintendent of the biological side of the British Museum, from 1856 to 1883.

Those who would rightly understand his work during the former period must of necessity take into account the history and extent of the vast collection which he was expected to catalogue and to develop, for it dominated and directed all his studies. It was formed by the celebrated surgeon, John Hunter, between 1763 and 1793, in which year he died. In studying it, one is at a loss what to admire most—the beauty of the specimens themselves, and the admirable clearness with which those preserved in spirit have been dissected and mounted; or the labour and self-denial which brought them together in the midst of the incessant occupations of a large practice; or the almost prophetic instinct which divined what posterity would require in the way of such aids to study. It was Hunter’s object to illustrate the phenomena of life in all organisms, whether in health or in disease. For this purpose he collected as widely as he could. There is an osteological series, and a physiological series (in spirit), which exhibits the different organs, digestive, circulatory, and the like, in order, and traces their development from the simplest to the most complicated form. To the Invertebrata he had devoted special attention. He had secured, through his friend Sir Joseph Banks, many of the treasures collected during Cook’s voyages; and he had purchased rarities as occasion offered. Of insects he had a large collection. Nor were his observations limited to the animal kingdom. Whenever any physiological process could be illustrated by vegetable life, vegetables were pressed into the service. Nor did he fail to recognize the truth—which some persons still refuse to accept—that the remains of extinct animals are only in their proper place when side by side with those still living on the earth. ‘His collection of fossils,’ says Owen in one of his prefaces, ‘was the largest and most select of any in this country.’

To contain this collection Hunter had built a special museum in Castle Street, Leicester Square, which was open to public inspection on certain days. After his death his executors, in accordance with his will, offered the collection to the Government. ‘Buy preparations?’ exclaimed Mr Pitt; ‘why, I have not money enough for gunpowder!’ Ultimately, however, the House of Commons agreed to give £15,000 for it, just one-fifth of the sum that Hunter is said to have spent upon it. Next arose the further question, who should take care of it. The Royal Society, it is said, did not consider it ‘an object of importance to the general study of natural history’; the British Museum was literary, not scientific; and finally, in 1799, the Corporation of Surgeons, as it was then called, accepted it, under the condition that a proper catalogue should be made, a conservator appointed, and twenty-four lectures in explanation of it delivered annually in the college. Soon afterwards the Corporation of Surgeons became the Royal College of Surgeons, and a building, to which Parliament contributed £27,500, was built for its reception. This was opened in 1813.

When Owen was appointed assistant-conservator of these collections thirty-four years had elapsed since Hunter’s death. During that time they had been preserved from damage by the devoted care of Mr William Clift, who, after being Hunter’s assistant for a short time, had been appointed conservator, first by the executors, and subsequently by the college. The general arrangement had been prescribed by Hunter, but no descriptive catalogue existed, as it had been, unfortunately, Hunter’s habit to trust to his memory for the history of his specimens. Further, though lists, more or less imperfect, drawn up either by Hunter himself or under his direction, had been preserved, the bulk of his papers had been destroyed by Sir Everard Home, his brother-in-law and executor. ‘There is but one thing more to be done—to destroy the collection,’ was Clift’s remark when he heard of this act of cynical wickedness. In the scarcity, therefore, of documentary evidence, other expedients had to be resorted to for the identification of the specimens which Hunter had dissected, or had preserved entire in spirit. As Owen remarks in the preface to the first volume of his descriptive catalogue (published in 1833), ‘It was necessary to consult the book of Nature.’ At first it was no easy matter to procure the animals required; but after the establishment of the Zoological Society this difficulty was in a great measure removed, and more than two hundred dissections were made by Owen in the course of the work incident to the preparation of the first volume of the catalogue.

This sketch of the Hunterian collections, which we would gladly have worked out in greater detail had our space allowed us to do so, will perhaps be sufficient to indicate to our readers the nature of the field of research on which Owen was about to enter. It was, in fact, an undiscovered country, of which he was to be the pioneer. One would like to know whether he had any idea of what the work he was about to undertake implied; and whether he had any misgivings as to his own fitness for it. He was only twenty-three years old, so perhaps, as youth is sanguine, he entered upon it with a light heart, thinking—if he paused to think—that he had strength of will sufficient to compensate for defect of years and knowledge. ‘On vieillit vite sur les champs de bataille.’ His previous training must have been in the main professional; he could have gained at most only a glimpse of comparative anatomy at the feet of Dr Barclay; the great writers on the subject, Buffon, Daubenton, Cuvier, and the rest, must have been mere names to him. Moreover, he was obliged, for lucre’s sake, to continue the profession of a surgeon, and, though he gradually dropped it, he must, for some time at least, have spent a good deal of time over it. Besides this, he probably assisted Clift in the brief catalogue of the Hunterian collections that appeared between 1833 and 1840. But, while thus engaged, he found time for study. For three years he attempted no original work; and when he did begin to write (his first paper is dated 9 November, 1830), it is evident that the previous years had been spent in wise preparation. There is no trace of the novice in the papers that followed each other in quick succession; they evince a complete mastery of the subject from the historical, as well as from the anatomical, side. The mere number of these communications, addressed principally to the Zoological Society, is almost past belief. Before the end of 1855 more than 250 had appeared, many of which were of considerable length, and enriched with elaborate drawings made by himself. But what is more surprising still is the versatility displayed in their composition. Nowadays a biologist is compelled to specialize. By ‘the custom of the country,’ to borrow a legal phrase, he selects his own subject, and is expected not to poach on that of his neighbours. But when Owen began to work, these laws existed not, or at any rate not for him. The very nature of his work obliged him to study in quick succession the most diverse structures; and, as death does not accommodate itself to human convenience, he could not tell from day to day what animals would be sent from the Zoological Gardens to his dissecting-room. An excellent bibliography of his works at the end of the second volume of the Life enables us to trace his studies in detail. For our present purpose we will only point out that between 1831 and 1835 he had written papers (among many others) on the orang-outang, beaver, Thibet bear, gannet, armadillo, seal, kangaroo, tapir, cercopithecus, crocodile, toucan, hornbill, pelican, flamingo, besides various Invertebrates.

While Owen was preparing himself for his serious attack on the catalogue an event occurred which had an important influence on his scientific development. Cuvier came to England to collect materials for his work on fishes, and naturally visited the Hunterian collection. Owen has preserved a singularly modest account of his introduction to the great French naturalist:

‘In the year 1830 I made Cuvier’s personal acquaintance at the Museum of the College of Surgeons, and was specially deputed to show and explain to him such specimens as he wished to examine. There was no special merit in my being thus deputed, the fact being that I was the only person available who could speak French, and who had at the same time some knowledge of the specimens. Cuvier kindly invited me to visit the Jardin des Plantes in the following year’ (i. 49).

Accordingly, Owen spent the month of August 1831 in Paris. It has been frequently stated, says his biographer, that Cuvier and his collection ‘made a great impression on Owen, and gave a direction to his after-studies of fossil remains,’ a position which he contests on the ground that neither Owen’s diary nor his letters describing the visit warrant such a conclusion. We do not attach much importance to this argument, but we feel certain that the Museum of the Jardin des Plantes, from its unfortunate subdivision into departments widely separated structurally from each other, could not have stimulated anybody in that particular direction. That Cuvier was, to a very large extent, Owen’s master in comparative anatomy is undeniable; he quotes him with respect, not to say with reverence, in almost every page of his writings, and the ‘Prix Cuvier’ adjudged to him in 1857 probably gave him more pleasure than all his other distinctions. Cuvier’s method, as set forth in Les Ossemens Fossiles, of illustrating and explaining extinct animals by comparison with recent was closely followed by his illustrious disciple. But this principle might easily have been learnt—and in our judgment was learnt—by a study of his works at home. On the other hand, Owen has stated, in unequivocal terms, the direction in which Cuvier did exert a special influence upon him. In his Anatomy of Vertebrates (iii. 786), published in 1868, he says:

‘At the close of my studies at the Jardin des Plantes, Paris, in 1831, I returned strongly moved to lines of research bearing upon the then prevailing phases of thought on some general biological questions.

‘The great Master in whose dissecting-rooms, as well as in the public galleries of comparative anatomy, I was privileged to work, held that “species were not permanent”; and taught this great and fruitful truth, not doubtfully or hypothetically, but as a fact established inductively on a wide and well-laid basis of observation.’

Further, Owen had the opportunity of listening to some of the debates between Cuvier and Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire on the question of how new species may originate; and ‘on returning home,’ he adds, ‘I was guided in all my work with the hope or endeavour to gain inductive ground for conclusions on these great questions.’ Here, then, was the definite educational result which Owen gained from his visit. It had, moreover, another consequence. It made him known to the French naturalists, then in the front rank of science. His scientific acquirements, coupled with his agreeable manners and facility in speaking and writing French, made him a persona grata in Paris. In 1839 he was elected a corresponding member of the Institute, and read more than one paper there in French.

We have already mentioned the long line of scientific papers which, from 1830 onwards, were the result of Owen’s indomitable energy. This series was now to be interrupted for a moment by the famous Memoir on the Pearly Nautilus, a quarto volume of sixty-eight pages, illustrated by eight plates, drawn by himself. The shell of the nautilus, as most persons know, has always been fairly common; but the animal which was given to the Museum of the College of Surgeons in 1831 was, we believe, the first, or nearly the first, which had ever reached this country, and Owen was most fortunate in having the chance of describing such a rarity. His essay, elaborate and exhaustive as it is, was dashed off in less than a year. It was received with a general chorus of praise. Dr Buckland spoke of it as ‘Mr Owen’s admirable work,’ and they were soon in correspondence on the way in which the nautilus sinks and rises in the water. Milne Edwards translated it into French, and Oken into German. Nor has the contemporary verdict been reversed by that of posterity. Mr Huxley says of the Memoir that it

‘placed its author, at a bound, in the first rank of monographers. There is nothing better in the MÉmoires sur les Mollusques, I would even venture to say nothing so good, were it not that Owen had Cuvier’s great work for a model; certainly, in the sixty years that have elapsed since the publication of this remarkable monograph it has not been excelled’ (ii. 306).

This essay seems to have given Owen a taste for the group to which the nautilus belongs. At the conclusion of the Memoir he proposed a new arrangement of it, now generally accepted, which includes the fossil as well as the recent forms; and, as occasion presented itself, he described other species and genera. The merit of a memoir on the fossil group called ‘belemnites,’ from the Oxford Clay, was the cause assigned for the award to him of the gold medal of the Royal Society in 1846.

Between 1833 and 1840 the long-desired catalogue, in five quarto volumes, made its appearance. Sir William Flower calls it ‘monumental’; a singularly happy epithet, for it commemorates, as a monument should do, alike the founder of the Museum and the industrious anatomist who had minutely described the four thousand specimens of which the ‘physiological series’—or, as we should now say, the series of organs—then consisted. Nor, though the arrangement is obsolete, can the work itself be regarded as without value, even at the present time. It has already served as a model for the catalogues of many other museums, and has taken its place in the literature of the subject. It is, in fact, an elaborate treatise on comparative anatomy from the point of view of the modifications of special organs. The thirteen years spent over it can hardly appear an excessively long time when we remember the work involved, and also the fact that the college had from the first recognized the duty of filling up gaps in the collection as occasion offered. Many of the specimens recorded in this catalogue had been prepared by Owen himself.

During the years that Owen spent upon the catalogue his position at the College of Surgeons was gradually becoming assured. He had begun as assistant-curator at £120 a year, but with no prospects, as the place of curator was expected to be given to Mr Clift’s son on his father’s retirement. But in 1832 the younger Clift died suddenly from the effects of an accident, and Owen remained as sole assistant at £200. In July 1833 his salary was raised to £300, and in 1835 he was enabled to marry Caroline Clift, Mr Clift’s only daughter. From this time until 1852, when the Queen gave him the delightful cottage at Sheen which he lived in till his death, he had apartments within the building of the College of Surgeons. They were small, and inconvenient in many ways. Owen was in the habit of turning his study into a dissecting-room, and his wife’s diary contains many amusing references to the pervading odours caused by the examination of a rhinoceros or an elephant, or to such disturbances as the following: ‘Great trampling and rushing upstairs past our bedroom door. Asked Richard if the men were dancing the polka on the stairs. He said, “No; what you hear is the body being carried upstairs. They are dissecting for fellowship to-day!”’ But, on the other hand, the proximity to the library and the museum, which he could enter at any hour of the night or day, must have greatly helped one who worked so incessantly. Ultimately, in 1842, Owen became sole curator, with Mr Quekett as his assistant. This was, no doubt, a dignified position, but it had its drawbacks. Owen’s golden time at the college was the period between 1827 and 1842, when the business details were taken off his hands by the painstaking and methodical Clift. After 1842 he was held responsible, as curators usually are, for much that he regarded as irksome routine. This he performed in a perfunctory fashion that did not please the Council, and difficulties arose between that body and their distinguished servant which time only rendered more acute. It may be that the Council were not sufficiently sensible of the honour reflected upon the college by possessing ‘the first anatomist of the age’; and Owen, on his side, may have been too fond of doing work which brought ‘grist to the mill,’ and applause, and troops of friends, without being directly connected with the college. However this may have been, it is beyond dispute that Owen’s removal, in 1856, to the British Museum, was a fortunate solution of a difficulty which otherwise would probably have ended in an explosion.

It has been already mentioned that when the Hunterian Museum was entrusted to the care of the College of Surgeons it had been stipulated that its contents should be illustrated by an annual course of twenty-four lectures. Up to 1836 this course had been divided between the professors of anatomy and surgery; but in that year Owen was appointed first Hunterian Professor of Comparative Anatomy and Physiology. To the last days of his life he constantly referred to the pleasure which this appointment gave him when first conferred upon him; nor did this feeling wear off as time went on. He gave his lectures regularly, with the same keen interest and thoroughness of preparation, down to 1855. At first he confined himself strictly to his prescribed subject; but gradually he widened his field, and introduced whatever views or subjects happened to be interesting him. Most of the lectures were worked up into books afterwards. He was an admirable lecturer—in fact, he was better as a lecturer than as a writer; for it must be confessed that his scientific style is often pedantic and cramped, and he seems to use words rather for the sake of concealing his thoughts than of imparting them. It is interesting to learn what pains he took with his early lectures—how he rehearsed them to his wife, or to a friend, till he got used to the work, and could estimate exactly how much would fill the allotted hour. We cannot refrain from quoting Mrs Owen’s account of the first lecture:

‘So busy all the morning; had hardly time to be nervous, luckily for me. R. robed in the drawing-room, and took some egg and wine before going into the theatre. He then went in and left me. At five o’clock a great noise of clapping made me jump, for I timed the lecture to last a quarter of an hour longer; but R., it seems, cut it short rather than tire Sir Astley Cooper too much. All went off as well as even I could wish. The theatre crammed, and there were many who could not get places. R. was more collected than he or I ever supposed, and gave this awful first lecture almost to his own satisfaction! We sat down a large party to dinner. Mr Langshaw and R. afterwards played two of Corelli’s sonatas’ (i. 109).

These lectures, more than anything that he wrote, made Owen famous, and procured for him a passport into society. To understand this, which appears almost a phenomenon at the present day, it must be remembered that the lecture-mania had not become one of the common diseases of humanity in 1836, and that it was still considered proper for great people to play the part of Mecenas to those who were distinguished in science or in letters. Hence, when the news spread abroad that a young and hitherto unknown lecturer was discoursing eloquently on a new subject in a building which few had heard of and none had seen, curiosity carried fashion into Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and certain dukes and earls, who cultivated a taste for natural history dans leur moments perdus, set the example of sitting at the feet of the new Gamaliel; more serious persons followed, and by-and-by a Hallam, a Carlyle, and a Wilberforce might be seen there side by side with the lights of medicine and surgery.

To most men the work which these lectures, together with the catalogue, entailed, would have been sufficient. But Owen loved diversity of occupations; and one of his fortunate accidents presently threw an attractive paleontological subject in his way. It happened in this wise. Readers of the Life of Charles Darwin will remember his disappointment, on his return home from the now classic voyage of the Beagle, to find that zoologists cared but little for his collections; that, in fact, Lyell and Owen were the only two who wished to possess any of his specimens. The latter, who had been introduced to him by the former, was not slow to grasp the scientific value of the extinct animals whose bones Darwin had dug with his own hands out of the fluviatile deposits of South America. He began with a huge skull—‘the head of an animal equalling in size the hippopotamus’—and described it before the Geological Society, in 1837, under the name of Toxodon platensis. Further, as Mr Huxley points out:

‘It is worthy of notice, that in the title of this memoir there follow, after the name of the species, the words “referable by its dentition to the Rodentia, but with affinities to the Pachydermata and the herbivorous Cetacea,” indicating the importance in the mind of the writer of the fact that, like Cuvier’s Anoplotherium and Paleotherium, Toxodon occupied a position between groups which, in existing Nature, are now widely separated’ (ii. 308).

The same writer bids us remark that this ‘maiden essay in paleontology possesses great interest’ from another point of view, for ‘it is with reference to Owen’s report on Toxodon that Darwin remarks in his Journal: “How wonderfully are the different orders, at the present time so well separated, blended together in different points in the structure of Toxodon.”’ Soon afterwards Owen described the rest of Darwin’s fossil specimens in the geological part of The Zoology of the ‘Beagle’ Voyage.

Two years later, in 1839, a second and still more sensational trouvaille came into his hands. A fragment of bone was offered for sale to the College of Surgeons, with the statement that it had been obtained in New Zealand from a native, who said that it was the bone of a great extinct eagle. Out of this fragment there ultimately grew that phalanx of huge extinct birds to which Owen gave the name of Dinornis (bird of wonder), on which he occupied himself till his death. His recognition of the true origin of this fragment was, no doubt, a wonderful instance of his osteological sagacity; but it is a misrepresentation of fact to say that he evolved the whole of an extinct bird out of a fragment of bone six inches long. What he did do, and how he did it, shall be told in his own words:

‘As soon as I was at leisure I took the bone to the skeleton of the ox, expecting to verify my first surmise [that it was a marrow-bone, like those brought to table wrapped in a napkin]; but, with some resemblance to the shaft of the thigh-bone, there were precluding differences. From the ox’s humerus, which also affords the tavern delicacy, the discrepancy of shape was more marked. Still, led by the thickness of the wall of the marrow-cavity, I proceeded to compare the bone with similar-sized portions of the skeletons of the various quadrupeds which might have been introduced and have left their remains in New Zealand; but it was clearly unconformable with any such portions.

‘In the course of these comparisons I noted certain obscure superficial markings on the bone, which recalled to mind similar ones which I had observed on the surface of the long bones in some large birds. Thereupon I proceeded with it to the skeleton of the ostrich. The bone tallied in point of size with the shaft of the thigh-bone in that bird, but was markedly different in shape. There were, however, the same superficial reticulate impressions on the ostrich’s femur which had caught my attention in the exhaustive comparison previously made with the mammalian bones.

‘In short, stimulated to more minute and extended examinations, I arrived at the conviction that the specimen had come from a bird, that it was the shaft of a thigh-bone, and that it must have formed part of the skeleton of a bird as large as, if not larger than, the full-sized male ostrich, with this more striking difference, that whereas the femur of the ostrich, like that of the rhea and eagle, is pneumatic, or contains air, the present huge bird’s bone had been filled with marrow, like that of a beast^[121].’

The suggestion was received with sceptical astonishment, and the paper in which Owen announced it to the Zoological Society (November 12, 1839) narrowly escaped exclusion from the Transactions of that body on the ground of its improbability. But confirmation was not slow to arrive, though in a direction that was not then expected. The bone was not fossilized; it was therefore naturally concluded that there existed somewhere in New Zealand—then but partially explored—a race of birds of gigantic stature and struthious affinities. We have no space to tell the story of the extinction of the moa, as the natives call it—surely the most weird and curious of all ‘the fairy-tales of science’; but to Owen certainly belongs the credit of having been the first to point the way to the great discovery. No work of his created so much excitement. Society, headed by Prince Albert, hurried to inspect the huge remains, of which a large series soon reached this country, and to be introduced to the fortunate necromancer, at whose bidding a phantom procession of strange creatures had suddenly stepped out of the past into the present.

From this time forward Owen continued to pay as much attention to extinct as to recent animals, as his numerous publications testify. The work fascinated and excited him.

‘There was no hunt,’ he declared, ‘so exciting, so full of interest, and so satisfactory when events prove one to have been on the right scent, as that of a huge beast which no eye will ever see alive, and which, perhaps, no mortal eye ever did behold. Such a chase is not ended in a day, in a week, nor in a season. One’s interest is revived and roused year by year as bit by bit of the petrified portions of the skeleton comes to hand. Thirty such years elapsed before I was able to outline a restoration of Diprotodon australis’ [the gigantic extinct kangaroo].

In 1841 appeared his ‘Description of the Skeleton of an Extinct Gigantic Sloth (Mylodon robustus), 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,’ as Sir W. Flower calls it. He demonstrated its affinities with the sloths on osteological and dental grounds, and then reasoned out its habits from its configuration; showing that a creature so vast could not have ascended trees, but must have pulled them down to browse on them at its leisure. Then came the work on British Fossil Mammals and Birds, with a long series of memoirs, growing in importance as evidences of new forms, discovered in all parts of the world, came pouring in, as though his own reputation had attracted them; on the Triassic Labyrinthodonts of Central England; on the extinct fauna of South Africa and Australia; on the Reptiles of the Wealden and other formations in England, published by the Paleontographical Society, of which he was one of the first and most ardent supporters; on the ArchÆopteryx from Solenhofen; on the Great Auk; and on the Dodo, one of the representations of which, in an old Dutch picture, he had the good fortune to discover. It is, indeed, as Mr Huxley remarks, ‘a splendid record: enough, and more than enough, to justify the high place in the scientific world which Owen so long occupied.’

These researches did not pass unrewarded. In 1838 the Geological Society gave to Owen the Wollaston Gold Medal for his work on Darwin’s collections, and it happened, by a fortunate coincidence, that Whewell, his fellow-townsman and school-fellow, occupied the chair on the occasion. In subsequent years he was twice invited to be president of that society; but on both occasions he was compelled to decline. Next, in 1841, Sir Robert Peel offered him a pension of £200 from the Civil List, protesting in a very gracious letter that he knew nothing about his political opinions, but merely wished ‘to encourage that devotion to science for which you are so eminently distinguished.’ This offer, which was gratefully accepted, laid the foundation of an intercourse between Owen and Sir Robert which ripened by-and-by into something like friendship. Dinners in London were succeeded by visits to Drayton, at one of which Owen amused the company with a microscope which he had brought with him (of course quite accidentally); and, finally, his portrait was painted for the gallery there, as a pendant to that of Cuvier. In 1845 Owen refused knighthood.

At this point in Owen’s career it will be convenient to pause for a moment and describe very briefly what manner of man it was that was rapidly becoming a leading figure in London society. We remember him from an earlier date than we care to mention, but, as we have no turn for portrait-painting, we gladly accept Sir W. Flower’s lifelike sketch:

‘Owen was tall and 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.’

His manners were distinguished for ceremonious courtesy, coupled with the formal exactness of a punctilious Frenchman. His bows were not easily forgotten. His enemies said, and his friends could not deny, that they varied with the rank of the person to whom he was presented. In fact Owen might have said, with Sir Pertinax Macsycophant, ‘I naver in my life could stond straight i’ th’ presence of a great mon; but awways boowed, and boowed, and boowed, as it were by instinct.’

Next to what he called ‘my dear comparative anatomy,’ Owen loved music, and was at one time no mean performer, both vocally and instrumentally. Music was his constant recreation in an evening, and he has even been known to take his violoncello out with him to parties. He was a frequent attendant at concerts and operas, and when Weber’s Oberon was first performed in London he went to hear it thirty nights in succession. The stage also had attractions for him, and he and his wife had many friends in the dramatic profession. Macready in Henry the Fifth, Charles Kean in Louis XI. and Richard III., and many minor stars, gave him great pleasure; and it was on the stage of Drury Lane Theatre, while joining the actors in singing the National Anthem on the occasion of the Queen’s first state visit, that he met Charles Dickens, who afterwards became his intimate friend. ‘London,’ he once said, ‘is the place for interchange of thought’; and it was a relief to him to lay his habitual pursuits aside for a few hours, and exchange ideas with men whose lives lay in lines wholly different from his own. He found dining-out a relaxation—the hours were earlier in those days—and gradually, as his social gifts were discovered, he was much in request. No man could tell a story better, and his general conversation was brilliant and original. He had the happy art of dilating on his own pursuits without being either a pedant or a bore. Consequently he was a member of many societies who, ‘greatly daring, dined,’ as, for instance, the Abernethy Club, the Literary Society, and The Club, founded by Dr Johnson, an exclusive society limited to forty members, in which he occupied the place once filled by Oliver Goldsmith. He also promoted the Royal Literary Fund and the Actors Benevolent Fund—where his after-dinner eloquence was much appreciated. He was a good chess-player, and was often matched, successfully, with some of the first players of the day, as Landseer, Staunton, and the Duke of Brunswick. His acquaintance with literature was wider than might have been expected from his absorbing occupations in other directions, and his retentive memory enabled him to quote pages of Milton, Shakespeare, and other standard writers. He was also an ardent novel-reader. Mrs Owen kept him well supplied with the novels of the day; and he sat up half the night over Eugene Aram, the serial stories of Dickens, Vanity Fair, Shirley, and The Mill on the Floss, which we are glad to find he preferred to all the rest of George Eliot’s stories. Apart from his social proclivities, he managed to get acquainted with most of the celebrated people of the day. They either came to see him and the museum he directed, or they asked him to call on them. Among those whom he met in this way we may mention Mrs Fry, Miss Edgeworth, Turner, Samuel Warren, Emerson, Guizot, the younger Dumas, Fanny Kemble, Tennyson, Macaulay, and Carlyle, who described him as ‘the man with the glittering eyes,’ and decided that he was ‘neither a fool nor a humbug.’ In his own especial line of science he was intimate with Lord Enniskillen, Sir Philip Egerton, Prince Lucien Bonaparte, Sedgwick, Murchison, Lyell; and subsequently took a keen interest in the researches of Livingstone, whom he helped with the first record of his African work. ‘Poor Livingstone!’ he says; ‘he does not know what it is to write a book.’ When Owen could find time for a holiday, which was but seldom, he enjoyed fishing and grouse-shooting; but his delight in Nature was so keen that probably sport was what he least valued in these excursions.

It was natural that, as Owen’s reputation grew, he should be involved in some of the schemes for improving the condition of the people which from time to time engaged the attention of Government. In 1843 he served on a commission of inquiry into the health of towns, and exercised himself over sewers, slaughter-houses, and such-like abominations. In 1846 he was on the Metropolitan Sewers Commission, which grew out of the former, and he did much good work in hunting up evidence about the spread of cholera and typhus from imperfect drainage. In the course of this he incurred considerable unpopularity, and was contemptuously nick-named ‘Jack of all Trades.’ The work became so heavy and absorbing that he thought of resigning; but when Lord Morpeth urged him to remain, on the ground that they could ill spare his ‘enlightened philanthropy,’ he not only withdrew his resignation, but consented to serve on a commission to consider the state of Smithfield Market and the meat supply of London (1849), a subject on which he held very decided opinions. Probably his zoological qualifications, coupled with his knowledge of what had been effected on the Continent in the way of establishing extramural slaughter-houses, had much to do with abolishing the market. He was also on the Preliminary Committee of Organization for the Great Exhibition of 1851, and chairman of the jury on raw materials, alimentary substances, &c. Similar services were performed by him for the exhibition held at Paris in 1855.

He was also a mark for many of those questions, serious and absurd alike, which are presented for solution to men of science. A firm of undertakers asked him how much they ought to charge for embalming Mr Beckford; a grave Oriental from the Turkish Embassy submitted to his examination the bowl of a tobacco-pipe which he believed to have been made out of the beak of a Phoenix; his opinion was sought by the Home Office on the window-tax, and by Charles Dickens on the publicity of executions; his microscopical skill was brought to bear on the so-called contemporary annotations of Shakespeare; and he demolished one of the many sea-serpents in which a marvel-loving public from time to time believes. He showed very conclusively that it was probably a large seal. His letter to the Times on the subject excited a good deal of attention, and Prince Albert dubbed him ‘the serpent-killer.’ He was also to a certain extent responsible for the models of extinct animals in the gardens of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, and was rewarded for his trouble by a dinner in the spacious carcase of the Iguanodon.

In 1856—it is said, through the influence of Lord Macaulay—Owen was appointed Superintendent of the Department of Natural History at the British Museum, with a salary of £800 a year. The new officer was to stand towards the collections of natural history in the same relation that the librarian did towards the books and antiquities, and to be directly responsible, as he was, to the trustees. Great advantages were expected to result from this new departure, and Owen was warmly congratulated. Professor Sedgwick wrote:

‘I trust that your move to the British Museum is for your happiness. If God spare your health, it will be a grand move for the benefit of British science. An Imperator was sadly wanted in that vast establishment’ (ii. 19).

With Lord Macaulay, anxiety for Owen himself had been paramount:

‘I am extremely desirous that something should be done for Owen. I hardly know him to speak to. His pursuits are not mine; but his fame is spread over Europe. He is an honour to our country, and it is painful to me to think that a man of his merit should be approaching old age amidst anxieties and distresses. He told me that eight hundred a year, without a house in the Museum, would be opulence to him’ (ii. 15).

A little foresight might have saved much disappointment. The subordinate officers, whom Owen was expected to influence, owed no allegiance to him, and resented his intrusion; they had long been practically independent within their own departments, and desired to remain so. Such a situation would have been difficult even for a born leader of men; but for Owen, whose gifts did not lie in that direction, it meant either resignation or acceptance of the inevitable. He chose the latter, and, dropping the sword of a despot, assumed the peaceful mantle of a constitutional sovereign. His reputation did good service to the collections in the way of attracting specimens of all kinds from all parts of the world; and he exerted himself with exemplary diligence to obtain special desiderata; but otherwise his duties as administrator soon became little more than nominal. There was, however, one subject connected with the Museum which had long engaged his attention, and which he had the pleasure to see settled before he died, though not entirely on the lines he had at first laid down.

It had been manifest for a considerable period that the British Museum was too small for the various collections, and two years before Owen’s arrival Dr Gray, keeper of zoology, had made a definite request for additional accommodation. The trustees, after much consideration, agreed to a small, but wholly inadequate, extension of one of the galleries. Owen did not act hastily, but, having thoroughly mastered the subject, addressed a report to the trustees in 1859, in which he showed that, having regard to the congestion of the existing galleries, the quantity of specimens stored out of sight, and the probable rate of increase, a space of ten acres ought to be acquired at once. This report was accompanied by a plan, drawn by himself, in which several special features may be noticed. A central hall was to contain an epitome of natural history—specimens selected to show the type-characters of the principal groups—called in subsequent editions of the plan the Index-Museum; adjoining this hall there was to be a lecture-theatre; zoology was to include physical ethnology, for which a gallery measuring 150 feet by 50 feet was to be provided; the Cetacea, stuffed specimens and skeletons, were to have a long gallery to themselves; and lastly, paleontology was no longer to be separated from zoology, but the gallery containing the one was to be readily entered from the gallery containing the other. A plan so novel, so enlightened, so truly imperial as this, was far too much in advance of the age to meet with anything except opposition and ridicule. When it was debated in the House of Commons, Mr Gregory, M.P. for Galway, got it referred to a Select Committee, regretting, in reference to its author, ‘that a man whose name stood so high should connect himself with so foolish, crazy, and extravagant a scheme.’ Owen’s first idea had been to purchase the land required at Bloomsbury; but on this point he had no very decided personal opinion, and, yielding to that of the majority of men of science, he advocated by lecture, by conversation, and in print, the removal of the collections of natural history to a new and distant site. For this scheme he fortunately secured the powerful advocacy of Mr Gladstone, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, who moved (May 12, 1862) for leave to bring in a Bill to effect it. These excellent intentions were thwarted by Mr Disraeli, who, knowing no more about science than he did about primroses, saw only a chance of obstructing a political opponent; and once more the scheme was adjourned. The adjournment, however, was of short duration, for in 1863 Parliament voted the purchase of five acres at South Kensington, which Owen presently persuaded the Government to increase to eight; but further delays, extending over nearly twenty years, ensued, and when Owen resigned in 1883 the collections were not yet completely arranged in their new home.

The Museum as completed is widely different from that which Owen originally prescribed. The gallery of ethnology is gone; the Cetacea are relegated, as at Bloomsbury in former days, to a cellar; there is no lecture-theatre; and, in fact, the index-museum is almost the only special feature which has survived, but even this was not arranged by himself. On one vital question of arrangement, moreover, Owen allowed his own views to be overruled. So early as 1842 he had reported to the Council of the College of Surgeons on the expediency of combining the fossil and recent osteological specimens, pointing out that

‘the peculiarities of the extinct mastodon, for example, cannot be understood without a comparison with the analogous parts of the elephant and tapir; nor those of the ichthyosaurus without reference to the skeletons of crocodiles and fishes. The proper position of such specimens in the Museum is, therefore, between those series of skeletons of which they present transitional or intermediate structures.’

An arrangement of the recent and fossil collections in accordance with these most reasonable and philosophical views appears in all the versions of the plan until the last; now it has entirely disappeared, and the two collections are disposed in opposite wings of the building widely severed from each other. Owen had no special turn for organization, and he was probably in a minority of one against his colleagues on this point. Besides this, his fighting days were over, and he preferred peace to an ideal arrangement of which his contemporaries could not see the advantages.

Owen turned his enforced leisure at the British Museum to good account, and proceeded, with renewed activity, to occupy himself in various directions. In 1857 he gave lectures on paleontology at the Royal School of Mines, and his first course seems to have evoked the enthusiasm of his earlier days. Said Sir Roderick Murchison:

‘I never heard so thoroughly eloquent a lecture as that of yesterday.... It is the first time I have had the pleasure of seeing our British Cuvier in his true place, and not the less delighted to listen to his fervid and convincing defence of the principle laid down by his great precursor. Everyone was charmed, and he will have done more (as I felt convinced) to render our institution favourably known than by any other possible method’ (ii. 61).

Soon afterwards he was appointed (1859-61) Fullerian Professor of Physiology at the Royal Institution. Here again he chose ‘Fossil Mammals’ as his subject. In later years he gave frequent lectures on this and kindred subjects in the larger provincial towns. Nor must we omit the lectures to the Royal children at Buckingham Palace, which he delivered at the request of Prince Albert in 1860. These lectures, which were much appreciated by those for whom they were intended, laid the foundations of a close friendship between Owen and the Royal Family.

It must not, however, be supposed that these occupations diverted him from osteology. It was during this period that he wrote many of the paleontological memoirs to which we have already alluded. He continued to publish paper after paper on Dinornis as fresh material accumulated; and he composed, among others, his monograph on the Aye-Aye (1863), which perhaps excited as much attention as that on the Nautilus thirty years before.

Between 1866 and 1868 he published his elaborate treatise On the Anatomy of Vertebrates, obviously intended to be the standard work on the subject for all time. But alas for the fallacies of hope! It is an immense store-house of information, founded in the main upon his own observations and dissections; and from no similar work will advanced students derive so much assistance. But, unfortunately, no revision of his own papers was attempted; the novel classification employed has never been accepted by any school of zoologists; and the only result of the proposed division of the Mammalia into four sub-classes, according to their cerebral characteristics, was a controversy from which Owen emerged with his reputation for scientific accuracy seriously impaired, if not irretrievably ruined. He had stated, not merely in the work of which we are speaking, but in others—as, for instance, in the Rede Lecture delivered at Cambridge in 1859—that certain divisions of the human brain were absent in the apes. It was proved over and over again, in public and private, that this assertion was contrary to fact, and contrary to his own authorities; but he could never be persuaded to retract, or even to modify, his statements.

At the end of the third volume of the Anatomy are some ‘General Conclusions,’ which contain, so far as human intelligence can penetrate the meaning of Owen’s ‘dark speech,’ his final views on the origin of species. We have already shown that his mind was first turned to this momentous question during his visit to Paris in 1831, and that subsequently, during his work on the Physiological and Osteological Catalogues of the Museum of the College of Surgeons, it was continually in his thoughts. During this period he read, and was profoundly influenced by, Oken’s Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie, a translation of which was published by the Ray Society, in 1847, at his instance. In his Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton (1848) he says:

‘The subject of the following essay has occupied a portion of my attention from the period when, after having made a certain progress in comparative anatomy, the evidence of a greater conformity to type, especially in the bones of the head of the vertebrate animals, than the immortal Cuvier had been willing to admit, began to enforce a reconsideration of his conclusions, to which I had previously yielded implicit assent.’

Out of the study here indicated there grew a revision of the vertebrate skeleton, in which the homologues (i.e. the same organs in different animals, under every variety of form and function) were recognized, and a new system of osteological nomenclature was proposed. In this Owen did excellent work, which has been generally accepted. But in his anxiety to recognize and account for ‘the one in the many,’ he adopted Oken’s idea of the skeleton being resolvable into a succession of vertebrÆ, and evolved the idea of an archetype. It is almost inconceivable that the clear-headed and sagacious interpreter, whose sober conclusions we have indicated through a long series of zoological and paleontological memoirs, should have ever adopted these transcendental speculations. But there was evidently a metaphysical side to his mind, and he took a keen, almost a puerile, delight in this child of his fancy. He even had a seal engraved with a symbolical representation of it. To show that we are not exaggerating we will quote his own account of his views when sending the seal to his sister:

‘It represents the archetype, or primal pattern—what Plato would have called the “Divine Idea”—on which the osseous frame of all vertebrate animals has been constructed. The motto is “The One in the Manifold,” expressive of the unity of plan which may be traced through all the modifications of the pattern, by which it is adapted to the varied habits and modes of life of fishes, reptiles, birds, beasts, and human kind. Many have been the attempts to discover the vertebrate archetype, and it seems now generally felt that it has been found’ (i. 388).

But, assuming Owen to have really discovered the one, he was as far off as ever from the origin of the many. And on this subject he never did reach any definite conclusion. He admits, it is true, a theory which sounds very like evolution:

‘Thus, at the acquisition of facts adequate to test the moot question of links between past and present species, as at the close of that other series of researches proving the skeleton of all Vertebrates, and even of Man, to be the harmonized sum of a series of essentially similar segments, I have been led to recognize species as exemplifying the continuous operation of natural law, or secondary cause; and that, not only successively, but progressively; from the first embodiment of the Vertebrate idea under its old Ichthyic vestment until it became arrayed in the glorious garb of the human form^[122].’

In this quotation he is in the main stating the views he held in 1849, for the latter portion of it is from his essay On the Nature of Limbs, published in that year. But the nature of the secondary cause which produced species cannot be concluded from his works. He fiercely contested Darwin’s theory of natural selection, both in conversation and in periodicals. To the last he clung to a notion of a ‘vital property,’ which is thus described in the Anatomy (iii. 807):

‘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.’

In 1883 Owen resigned his office at the British Museum and retired into private life. His remaining years were passed at Sheen in a tranquil and apparently happy old age. In 1884 he was gazetted a K.C.B., and, on Mr Gladstone’s initiative, his pension was augmented by £100 a year. But, though it pleased him to be always pleading poverty, he was really a comparatively wealthy man, and when he died left £30,000 behind him. His wife died in 1873, and his only son in 1886; but a solitude which might have been painful was enlivened by the presence of his son’s widow and her seven children. Owen delighted in the country. He had a genuine love for outdoor 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 died, literally of old age, on Sunday, 18 January, 1892.

It is much to be regretted that one who worked at his own subjects with such untiring zeal should have left behind him almost nothing to perpetuate his name with the great mass of the people. Mr Huxley remarks that, ‘whether we consider the quantity or the quality of the work done, or the wide range of his labours, I doubt if, in the long annals of anatomy, more is to be placed to the credit of any single worker’ (ii. 306); but he presently adds this caution: ‘Obvious as are the merits of Owen’s anatomical work to every expert, it is necessary to be an expert to discern them’ (ii. 332). He gave popular lectures, but they were not printed^[123]; he wrote what he intended to be a work for all time, but it has faded out of recollection, and the whole theory of the archetype is now as dead as his own Dinornis. Nor was he at pains to surround himself with a circle of pupils who might have handed down the teaching of the Master to another generation, as Cuvier’s teaching was handed down by his pupils. It was one of Owen’s defects that he was repellent to younger men. In a word, he was secretive, impatient of interference, and preferred to be aut CÆsar aut nullus. Credit was to him worth nothing if it was to be divided. Again, brilliant as were his talents and assured as was his position, he could not recognize the truth that men may sometimes err, and that the greatest gain rather than lose by admitting it. During the whole of his long life we believe that he never owned to a mistake. Not only was what he said law, but what others ventured to say—especially if it ‘came between the wind and his nobility’—was to be brushed aside as of no moment. We believe that this feeling on his part explains his refusal to accept the Darwinian theory. As we have shown, he went half way with it, and then dropped it, because it had not been hammered on his own anvil. This unfortunate antagonism to other workers, coupled with his readiness to enter into controversy, and the acrimony and dexterity with which he handled his adversaries, naturally discouraged those who would otherwise have been only too happy to sit at the feet of the Nestor of English zoology; and during the last thirty years of his life he became gradually more and more isolated. Moreover, there was, or there was thought to be, a certain want of sincerity about him which no amount of external courtesy could wholly conceal. In a word, he was compact of strange contradictions. He had many noble qualities; and yet he could not truly be called great, for they were warped and overshadowed by many moral perversities. Had he lived in the previous century his portrait might have been sketched by Pope:

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