Ill 



years 1833 and 1840. This work, which lias been taken as a model 

 for many other subsequent!-' published catalogues, contains a minute 

 description of nearly four thousand preparations. The labour in- 

 volved in preparing it was greatly increased by the circumstance 

 that the origin of a large number of them had not been preserved, 

 and even the species of the animals from which they were derived 

 had to be discovered by tedious researches among old documents, 

 or by comparison with fresh dissections. It was mainly to aid 

 him in this work that he engaged upon the long series of dissections 

 of animals which died from bime to time in the Gardens of the 

 Zoological Society, the descriptions of which, as published in the 

 Proceedings and Transactions of the Society, form a precious fund 

 of information upon the comparative anatomy of the higher Verte- 

 brates. The series commences with an account of the anatomy of 

 an Orang Utan, which was communicated to the first scientific 

 meeting of the Society, held on the evening of Tuesday, November 9, 

 1830, and was continued with descriptions of dissections of the 

 Beaver, Suricate, Acouchy, Thibet Bear, Gannet, Crocodile, Arma- 

 dillo, Seal, Kangaroo, Tapir, Toucan, Flamingo, Hyrax, Hornbill, 

 Cheetah, Capybara, Pelican, Kinkajou, Wombat, Giraffe, Dugong, 

 Apteryx, Wart-hog, Walrus, Great Ant-eater, and many others. 



Among the many obscure subjects in anatomy and physiology 

 on which he threw much light by his researches at this period were 

 several connected with the generation, development, and structure of 

 the Marsupialia and Monotrema, groups which always had great 

 interest for him. It is a curious coincidence that his first paper 

 communicated to the Royal Society (in 1832) " On the Mammary 

 Glands of the Ornithorhynchus paradoxus " was one of a series which 

 only terminated in almost the last which he offered to the same 

 Society (in 1887), being a description of a newly excluded young of 

 the same animal, published in the ' Proceedings,' vol. 42, p. 391. 



On the completion of the ' Catalogue of the Physiological Series ' 

 his curatorial duties led him to undertake the catalogues of 

 the osteological collections of recent and extinct forms. This task 

 necessitated minute studies of the modifications of the skeleton in all 

 vertebrated animals, and researches into their dentition, the latter 

 being finally embodied in his great work on ' Odontography ' 

 (1840-45), in which he brought a vast amount of light out of what 

 was previously chaotic in our knowledge of the subject, and cleared 

 the way for all future work upon it. Although recent advances of 

 knowledge have shown that there are difficulties in accepting the 

 whole of Owen's system of homologies and notation of the teeth of 

 Mammals, it was an immense improvement upon anything of the 

 kind which existed before, and a considerable part of it seems likely 

 to remain a permanent addition to our means of describing these 



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