Afuiual Report of the Council. 237 



Mr. Clift, who had long been the conservator of the 

 Hunterian Museum, and it was the daughter of that early 

 historian of the Mastodon and the Megatherium who happily 

 became the companion of so many of Owen's future years. 

 In 1836 he succeeded the celebrated Sir Charles Bell in 

 the Professorship of Anatomy and Physiology, as well as 

 followed the veteran Clift in the curatorship of the College 

 Museum ; circumstances which necessarily led to his 

 abandonment of his medical practice. Thus freed from all 

 collateral restraints, he flung himself heartily into the vast 

 succession of researches which became the glory of his 

 future life. Amongst the earliest of these labours were 

 those investigations which culminated in 1840-41 in the 

 publication of his celebrated " Odontography." This treatise 

 described the comparative anatomy, physiological relations, 

 mode of development, and microscopic structure of teeth. 

 It was in many respects an admirable work, though not 

 accurate in some important physiological features. In 1843 

 he published his lectures on " The Comparative Anatomy 

 of the Invertebrate Animals," followed in 1846 by a similar 

 work on " Fishes." But in the latter year we find him 

 taking a higher flight. Meanwhile, there had arisen in 

 Germany a school of which Lorenz Oken was the 

 prominent representative. Amongst other objects aimed 

 at by that philosophical thinker he sought to discover 

 some laws of unity in the various diversified parts of the 

 vertebrate skeleton. He wanted to know, for example, 

 what the skull was as compared with the vertebrate column 

 from which it appeared to differ so widely. Resting one day 

 whilst hunting in a German forest his eye fell upon the dried 

 skull of a deer that lay in the grass, when the idea suggested 

 itself to his mind that, like the vertebral column, it was merely 

 a chain of modified vertebrae ; and, having determined this 

 point,he applied the same theory to the rest of the skeleton. 

 Owen proceeded upon the same hypothesis, when, in 



