Animal Morphology. 31 



true Anatomy (1833-1840), founded upon John Hunter's 

 preparations, Owen may be said to have spent much of 

 his life in expanding it. From orang to duckmole, from 

 pearly nautilus to Venus's flower-basket, a long series of 

 interesting types yielded many of their secrets to his 

 anatomical skill. In 1866-1868 he summed up many of 

 his results in his Anatomy and Physiology of the Verte- 

 brates^ which Sir William Flower, who has developed 

 the British Museum of Natural History far beyond 

 Owen's dreams, calls "the most encyclopaedic work on 

 the subject accomplished by any one individual since 

 Cuvier's Lemons d'Anatomie Comparee" . 



Minute studies of the skeletons of living animals, and 

 of their teeth in particular (Odontography, 1840-1845), 

 enabled Owen, like his master Cuvier, to win great suc- 

 cess in the reconstruction of the extinct. His memoirs 

 on the gigantic sloth Mylodon, on the giant birds of New 

 Zealand, on Archceopteryx, the oldest known bird, on the 

 extinct reptiles of Britain, on the fossil Belemnites from 

 the Oxford clay, remain, along with many others, well- 

 known classics. 



Owen excelled Cuvier in the accuracy of his work and 

 in the generalizing spirit which he brought to bear upon 

 his problems. The working out of the structural con- 

 trasts between even-toed and odd-toed hoofed mammals 

 (Artiodactyl and Perissodactyl Ungulates) may perhaps 

 be cited as representative of his best morphological 

 work, while his persistent adherence to the vertebral 

 theory of the skull (which interprets the skull as com- 

 posed of a few segments each comparable to a vertebra) 

 illustrates his worst. It was characteristic of him to go 

 doggedly along his own path with scant attention to 

 what others were achieving. In another respect, his 

 work seems disappointing, though it is perhaps difficult, 

 in our modern atmosphere, to judge justly on the mat- 

 ter; we refer to his attitude to evolution doctrine. It is 

 certain that he was no supporter of the "special crea- 

 tion" hypothesis, but his utterances suggest half-hearted- 

 ness as regards the theory of evolution. One of the 

 most explicit reads: "So, being unable to accept the 

 volitional hypothesis, or that of impulse from within, or 



