xxn RICHARD OWEN 365 



furnished him with unusual facilities for pursuing his work 

 by night as well as day in the museum, dissecting rooms, and 

 library of that institution. 



Owen's life of scientific activity may be divided into two 

 periods, during each of which the nature of his work was 

 determined to a considerable extent by the circumstances by 

 which he was environed. Each of these periods embraces a 

 term of very nearly thirty years. The first, from 1827 to 

 1856, was spent at the Eoyal College of Surgeons ; the second, 

 from 1856 to 1884, in the British Museum. It was in the 

 first that he mainly made his great reputation as an anatomist, 

 having utilised to the fullest possible extent the opportunities 

 which were placed in his way by the care of the Hunterian 

 Museum. For many years he worked in that institution 

 under the happiest of auspices. From the routine and 

 drudgery which always take up so large a portion of the 

 time of a conscientious museum curator, he was relieved by 

 the painstaking, methodical William Clift ; the far more gifted 

 son-in-law being thus able to throw himself to his heart's 

 content into the higher work of the office. This at first 

 mainly consisted in the preparation of that monumental 

 Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Physiological Series 

 of Comparative Anatomy, founded upon Hunter's preparations, 

 largely added to by Owen himself, which was published in five 

 quarto volumes between the years 1833 and 1840. This 

 work, which has been taken as a model for many other sub- 

 sequently published catalogues, contains a minute description 

 of nearly four thousand preparations. The labour involved 

 in preparing it was greatly increased by the circumstance that 

 the origin of a large number of them had not been preserved, 

 and even the species of the animals from which they were 

 derived had to be discovered by tedious researches among old 

 documents, or by comparison with fresh dissections. It was 

 mainly for aid in this work that he engaged upon the long 

 series of dissections of animals which died from time to time 

 in the Gardens of the Zoological Society, the descriptions of 

 which, as published in the Proceedings and Transactions of 

 the Society, form a precious fund of information upon the 

 comparative anatomy of the higher vertebrates. The series 



