I. 



Owen. 



I.— BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE. 



IT is with deep regret that we record this month the death of Sir 

 Richard Owen. The ablest comparative anatomist of his time, 

 Owen ranks with Darwin and Lyell as one of the greatest naturaHsts 

 that England has yet produced. 



Born at Lancaster eighty-eight years ago, Richard Owen 

 received his early education at the local grammar school, and became, 

 at the age of twenty, a student at Edinburgh University. His 

 activity and talents enabled him to reap the fullest advantages offered 

 by his teachers, among whom were Wm. Pulteney Alison, T. C. 

 Hope, Robert Jameson, Alexander Monro (the third), and Alexander 

 Barclay ; and in 1825 he had already been elected President of the 

 Hunterian Society, which he and others had formed a short time 

 before. Leaving Edinburgh in 1826, Owen joined the medical school 

 of St. Bartholomew's Hospital, where he came into contact with the 

 celebrated John Abernethy. It was, it is interesting to note, to the 

 Medical Society of this hospital that he presented his first published 

 paper, " An Account of the Dissection of the parts concerned in the 

 Aneurism, for the cure of which Dr. Stevens tied the Internal Iliac 

 Artery," which appeared in the Medico-Chinivgical Transactions for 

 1830. 



In the year 1826, he became a member of the Royal College of 

 Surgeons, and contemplated entering the Naval Service. Fortu- 

 nately, however, for Science, Abernethy, recognising the material in 

 the man, obtained for him a post at the College of Surgeons, as 

 assistant to William Clift. From this moment, the brilliancy of 

 Owen's genius commenced to shine, and for fifty years, until age 

 overclouded it, remained undimmed. His first work at the College of 

 Surgeons was to assist Clift in the preparation of Catalogues of the 

 Museum, which had been mainly formed by the anatomist, John 

 Hunter, a man Owen greatly revered, and whose works he later on 

 edited from the manuscripts rescued by Clift from the vandaUsm of 

 Everard Home. 



The publication of a detailed and exhaustive paper on the 

 ^&Q.r\y nviMtWns {Nautilus pompilius), \n 1832, at once raised Owen to 

 the foremost rank of working naturalists. Not only was this memoir 



