Owen. 
I.—BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE. 
T 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 naturalists 
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-Chivurgical Tyansactions 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 vandalism of 
Everard Home. 
The publication of a detailed and exhaustive paper on the 
pearly nautilus (Nautilus pompilius), in 1832, at once raised Owen to 
the foremost rank of working naturalists. Not only was this memoir 
