SIR RICHARD OWEN 129 



The collections of Natural History of the British 

 Museum had been kept at Bloomsbury. Neither 

 the specimens nor the accommodation for them were 

 at all worthy of the National Museum. But the 

 subject of Natural History had not, until the second 

 quarter of the last century, taken the place either 

 in the esteem of men of science or in the interest 

 of the public which it was destined to occupy. 

 "A scientific naturalist who lived in England in the 

 second quarter of the last century may be accounted 

 a fortunate man," says Mr. J. Willis Clark, an old 

 and valued friend of Flowers, in his chapter on 

 Richard Owen included in his recollections of Old 

 Friends at Cambridge and Elsewhere. '* On the 

 one hand was the vast field of the universe, un- 

 divided, unallotted ; on the other a public eager for 

 instruction." 



The man who came first upon the scene, and had 

 the good fortune to be ready just when he was 

 wanted, was Richard Owen. It is somewhat the 

 fashion to disregard what Owen did in the light of 

 what he did not do, and to allow his failure to 

 appreciate the value of Darwin's discovery of the 

 principles of evolution, and his intense absorption in 

 his own personal position in the estimation of "a 

 public to which he had long been accustomed to act 

 as the leading and almost the sole exponent of 

 zoology, to obscure one of his great services to the 

 practical promotion of that study. 



It has been said that appreciation is one of the 



K 



