88 BIOGRAPHIES OF SCIENTIFIC MEN 



presence of a genius. Nearly every one of his memoirs 

 represents a large amount of laborious research, and in the 

 aggregate they bear ample testimony to the soundness of 

 that consensus of opinion which stamps Sir Richard Owen 

 as the greatest palaeontologist since Cuvier, and a com- 

 parative anatomist only second in the immensity and 

 importance of his labours to Hunter himself. 



Owen was a most interesting and charming character ; 

 was a prodigious and untiring worker ; lived a long, 

 active, public life ; knew nearly everybody who was worth 

 knowing ; a friend of royalty, and to the earnest worker 

 " a guide, philosopher, and friend/' 



Devoid of the least superstition, Owen told excellent 

 ghost stories. These were famous and blood-curdling, 

 and on many occasions he was particularly requested to 

 narrate one or more of them. The stories were based on 

 facts, which made them all the more interesting. 



No man, not even Cuvier, has done so much as Owen 

 to recreate the past, in visiting the " valley of dry bones " 

 and informing these remains with the strange and weird 

 life that endowed them ; and in restoring in vivid outline 

 that ancient world when huge " dragons of the prime " 

 wallowed in the basins of the Thames and Seine, and when 

 in a later age tigers, lions, hyaenas and their kin contested 

 with primitive man the supremacy of the sites where now 

 London and Paris stand. It is pleasing to contemplate 

 such pictures of the world's past. Who, outside scientific 



