18441858] SIR R. OWEN 59 



To Richard Owen. 1 Letter 25 



Down [Mar. 26th, 1848]. 



My dear Owen 



I do not know whether your MS. instructions are sent 

 in ; but even if they are not sent in, I daresay what I am 



1 Richard Owen (1804-92) was born at Lancaster, and educated at 

 the local Grammar School, where one of his schoolfellows was William 

 Whewell, afterwards Master of Trinity. He was subsequently apprenticed 

 to a surgeon and apothecary, and became deeply interested in the study 

 of anatomy. He continued his medical training in Edinburgh and at 

 St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London. In 1827 Owen became assistant 

 to William Clift (whose daughter Owen married in 1835), Conservator to 

 the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. It was here 

 that he became acquainted with Cu.vier, at whose invitation he visited 

 Paris, and attended his lectures and those of Geoffrey St. Hilaire. The 

 publication, in 1832, of the Memoir on the Pearly Nautilus placed the 

 author " in the front rank of anatomical monographers." On Clift's 

 retirement, Owen became sole Conservator to the Hunterian Museum, 

 and was made first Hunterian Professor of Comparative Anatomy and 

 Physiology at the Royal College of Surgeons. In 1856 he accepted the 

 post of Superintendent of the Natural History department of the British 

 Museum, and shortly after his appointment he strongly urged the estab- 

 lishment of a National Museum of Natural History, a project which was 

 eventually carried into effect in 1875. In 1884 he was gazetted K.C.B. 

 Owen was a strong opponent of Darwin's views, and contributed a bitter 

 and anonymous article on the Origin of Species to the Edinburgh 

 Review of 1860. The position of Owen in the history of anatomical 

 science has been dealt with by Huxley in an essay incorporated in the 

 Life of Richard Owen, by his grandson, the Rev. Richard Owen (2 vols., 

 London, 1894). Huxley pays a high tribute to Owen's industry and 

 ability: "During more than half a century Owen's industry remained 

 unabated ; and whether we consider the quality or the quantity 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." 

 The record of his work is "enough, and more than enough, to justify the 

 high place in the scientific world which Owen so long occupied. If I 

 mistake not, the historian of comparative anatomy and palaeontology will 

 always assign to Owen a place next to, and hardly lower than, that of 

 Cuvier, who was practically the creator of those sciences in their modern 

 shape, and whose works must always remain models of excellence in 

 their kind." On the other hand, Owen's contributions to philosophical 

 anatomy are on a much lower plane ; hardly any of his speculations in 



