OWEN 83 



he had shown vast groups of animals to be allied to 

 one another. 



Owen's palseontological work is of the highest order ; 

 and in work like his fossil mammals, birds, and reptiles, 

 he excelled. The most characteristic of his faculties was 

 a powerful scientific imagination. As the author wrote 

 in one of his books, " the imagination is, after all, the most 

 precious faculty with which a scientist can be equipped. 

 It is a risky possession, it is true, for it leads him astray 

 a hundred times for once that it conducts him to truth ; 

 but without it he has no chance at all of getting at the 

 meaning of the facts he has learned or discovered." 

 Professor H. E. Armstrong says : "It is justifiable to say 

 that imagination plays an important part in chemistry ; 

 and that if too rigidly and narrowly interpreted, facts may 

 become very misleading factors." 



Fragments of bone which might be meaningless to less 

 alert observers enabled Owen to divine the structure and 

 present the images of whole groups of extinct animals 

 in this respect he was a disciple of Cuvier ; and Cuvier was 

 Owen's model. Cuvier could not accept the doctrine of 

 homology, or the likeness of corresponding organs in 

 animals as regards structure and type, as, e.g., between the 

 foreleg of a quadruped, the wing of a bird, and the arm 

 of a man, which are of kindred origin, but modified through 

 long and lateral descent for the work which they do. The 

 influence of Cuvier's ideas on Owen was manifest through 



