John Hunter, Richard Owen 265 



completed and the collection was offered to the Royal 

 College of Physicians. On their refusal to accept it, it was 

 offered to and accepted by the Corporation of Surgeons, 

 which next year became the Royal College of Surgeons, 

 and from 1806 the Hunterian Collection has been housed 

 in Lincoln's Inn Fields. At the present time this original 

 nucleus of the College museum comprises one-fifth of the 

 specimens therein exhibited. 



The most dominant zoologist in the first half of the 

 nineteenth century was Sir Richard Owen (1804-1892), who 

 was born at Lancaster and was educated at the grammar 

 school of that town with William Whewell, the author of 

 the " History of the Inductive Sciences." When he was 

 sixteen he was apprenticed to a surgeon, and here his love 

 of anatomy at once found scope. Later he matriculated 

 at Edinburgh, and attended the extra-mural course of 

 lectures on anatomy given by Dr. John Barclay, who, as 

 Owen himself testified, has an " extensive knowledge of 

 vertebrate anatomy." In the spring of 1835 he joined 

 St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London, having passed the 

 examination of the Royal College of Surgeons, and later 

 set up in private practice near Lincoln's Inn Fields. He 

 became lecturer on Comparative Anatomy at his hospital in 

 1827, and after a short interval he was appointed Assistant 

 Conservator of the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College 

 of Surgeons. The Conservator was then William Clift, who 

 had done so much to preserve Hunter's Museum in the 

 long interval between his death and its transference to 

 the Royal College of Surgeons. In 1831 Cuvier invited 

 Owen to Paris, where he attended Cuvier 's and Geoffroy 

 St. Hilaire's lectures in the Jardin des Plantes. 



Owen was well known as a writer of monographs on 

 many rare animals, and the first of these was his memoir 

 on the " Pearly Nautilus," which placed him, as Huxley 

 says, " in the front rank of anatomical monographers." 

 In the early forties, he succeeded Clift, whose daughter 

 he had married, as Conservator to the Royal College of 

 Surgeons. But before this, in 1836, he had been made the 

 first Hunterian Professor of Comparative Anatomy at the 

 College, which involved the annual delivery of twenty-four 



