woodward: professor sir richard owen, k.c.b. 103 



Surgeons in 1S26. He acted as dissector at St. Bartholomew's 

 Hospital, where his skill attracted the attention of the famous 

 Dr. Abernethy, and led to his engagement as Assistant-Curator to 

 Mr. William Clift, at the Royal College of Surgeons, whose daughter 

 he subsequently married, and to whose appointment, as Conservator 

 of the Hunterian Collections, Owen succeeded at a later date. 



Profiting by the opportunity to spend some time in Paris, he 

 attended Baron Cuvier's lectures, which so fired his love of science 

 that he speedily abandoned practise as a medical man, and turned 

 all his attention to a scientific career. In addition to the work on 

 the Hunterian Collections at the College, Owen acted as honorary 

 prosector to the Zoological Society and his memoirs on the Apteryx; 

 the great Ant-eater ; on the Indian Rhinoceros ; the Orang-utan ; 

 on the anatomy of the Cheetah ; the Kinkajou ; the Warthog ; the 

 Dugong; the Armadillo; the Tapir; the Hyrax ; the Seal; the 

 Beaver : the Walrus ; the tree-Kangaroo ; and many others, are the 

 results to science of this period of his life. In 1834 Owen was 

 appointed to the chair of Comparative Anatomy at St. Bartholomew's, 

 and became " Professor." In 1835 he was elected Hunterian 

 Professor and conservator of the Museum of the Royal College of 

 Surgeons, and in 1S36 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. 



Notwithstanding the arduous nature of his official work at this 

 time, Prof. Owen managed to pioduce that very remarkable series 

 of " Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogues of the Specimens of 

 Physiology and Comparative Anatomy," of " Natural History," of 

 "Osteology," and of "Fossil Organic Remains," preserved in the 

 Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons (1833-40; 4to.) his 

 "Odontography," (2 vols., 4to, 1840-45); besides a large series of 

 separate memoirs, amongst them his contributions to " Todd's 

 Cyclopaedia of Anatomy and Physiology" (1836), see Article 

 "Cephalopoda," &c, &c. 



The great passion of Prof. Owen's life was the comparative study 

 of recent and extinct forms of life. This led to the remarkable 

 announcement, made in 1839, that struthious birds, as large as the 

 ostrich, would be found in New Zealand. At that time Owen had 

 only seen a small fragment of the shaft of a femur of a bird, but he 

 recognised it as such, and although the greatest doubt was felt by 

 others, his forecast proved to be true, and soon after Dr. Mantell's 

 son sent over quite a large number of bones of the "Moa" or Diner -//is, 

 which furnished materials for more than twenty species and for the 

 genera Aptornis, A T oternis, Cnemiornis, &c. s besides. These appeared 

 from time to time in the Transactions of the Zoological Society of 

 London, and with his memoir on the Dodo, &c, have since been 



