.893. OWEN. 1-31 



be said to have contributed most to the demohtion of the narrow 

 Cuvierian views ; when deahng with animals closely related to those 

 now living, his correctness of interpretation was usually assured — 

 when treating of more remote types he could do little more than 

 guess, unless tolerably complete skeletons happened to be at his 

 disposal. The fragmentary thigh-bone of Dinovnis, brought to him in 

 1839, sufficed for the great anatomist to demonstrate that gigantic 

 flightless birds had once existed in New Zealand ; and the single 

 fragment of the end of the lower jaw of Dipvotodon from New South 

 Wales was enough to enable him to conceive the former existence 

 of that huge wombat-like animal in Australia. When, however, 

 the molar teeth and femur of Dipvotodon were first discovered, 

 Owen failed to recognise their relationships and described them 

 as evidence of a " Dinotherioid or Mastodontoid pachyderm " in 

 Australia; and the restoration of the "great horned lizard" of 

 Queensland (Megalania) has proved even more unfortunate, the back- 

 bone only belonging to a lizard, the head and tail to a tortoise, and 

 the toes to a marsupial quadruped. The supposed tooth of a monkey 

 from the Eocene of Woodbridge soon proved to belong to a primitive 

 hoofed animal ; and there is no longer any doubt that the comparison 

 of Steveognathus, from the Oolites, with the Ungulata is based upon a 

 complete misapprehension. In short, Owen's work on fragmentary 

 fossils has demonstrated that the principles of comparative anatomy 

 are very different from those inferred by Cuvier from his limited field 

 of observation ; and the discoveries of Leidy, Marsh, Cope, Scott, and 

 Osborn in America have finally led to a new era that Owen only began 

 to foresee clearly in his later days. 



Throughout this work, one of the most striking features was the 

 persistence with which Owen followed each subject until he had 

 exhausted all available material. Impressed, in the earlier part of his 

 career, with the researches of Retzius and others on the minute 

 structure of teeth, he discussed and extended these observations until 

 he had studied in detail the teeth of every known division of the 

 vertebrates, living and extinct ; and thus was produced his unrivalled 

 work on Odontogvaphy (1840-45). He began his researches on British 

 fossil mammals, birds, and reptiles, also, by contributing exhaustive 

 summaries of all known material to the Reports of the British 

 Association ; and, although his results were usually published in small 

 instalments in scientific serials, he nearly always arranged that the 

 various groups of papers should follow in connected sequence, and in 

 many cases he had them reprinted in the form of successive sheets of 

 separate works, which appeared as Researches on the Fossil Remains of the 

 Extinct Mammals of A ustralia, with a notice of the Extinct Marsupials of 

 England (2 vols., 1877), Memoirs on the Extinct Wingless Birds of New 

 Zealand (2 vols., 1879), and A History of British Fossil Reptiles {i8^g-8^). 

 This method is convenient for purposes of reference, but it naturally 

 led to continual disagreement between the author of the memoirs and 



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