366 RICHARD OWEN xxn 



commences with an account of the anatomy of an orang-utan, 

 which was communicated to the first scientific meeting of the 

 Society, held on the evening of Tuesday, 9th November 1830, 

 and was continued with descriptions of dissections of the 

 beaver, suricate, acouchy, Thibet bear, gannet, crocodile, 

 armadillo, seal, kangaroo, tapir, toucan, flamingo, hyrax, horn- 

 bill, cheetah, capybara, pelican, kinkajou, wombat, giraffe, dugong, 

 apteryx, wart-hog, walrus, great ant-eater, and many others. 



Among the many obscure subjects in anatomy and physio- 

 logy on which Owen threw much light by his researches at 

 this period were several connected with the generation, de- 

 velopment, and structure of the Marsupialia and Monotrema, 

 groups which always had great interest for him. It is a 

 curious coincidence that his first paper, communicated to the 

 Eoyal Society (in 1832), "On the Mammary Glands of the 

 Ornithorhynchus paradoxus" was one of a series which only 

 terminated in almost the last which he offered to the same 

 Society (in 1887), being a description of a newly excluded 

 young of the same animal, published in the Proceedings, vol. 

 42, p. 391. 



On the completion of the Catalogue of the Physiological 

 Series his curatorial duties led him to undertake the catalogues 

 of the osteological collections of recent and extinct forms. 

 This task necessitated minute studies of the modifications of 

 the skeleton in all vertebrated animals, and researches into 

 their dentition, the latter being finally embodied in his great 

 work on Odontograpliy (1840-45), in which he brought a vast 

 amount of light out of what was previously chaotic in our 

 knowledge of the subject, and cleared the way for all future 

 work upon it. Although recent advances of knowledge have 

 shown that there are difficulties in accepting the whole of 

 Owen's system of homologies and notation of the teeth of 

 Mammals, it was an immense improvement upon anything of 

 the kind which existed before, and a considerable part of it 

 seems likely to remain a permanent addition to our means of 

 describing these organs. The close study of the bones and 

 teeth of existing animals was of extreme importance to him 

 in his long continued and laborious researches into fossil 

 forms ; and, following in the footsteps of Cuvier, he fully 



