368 RICHARD OWEN xxn 



The contributions which Owen made to our knowledge of 

 the structure of Invertebrate animals nearly all belong to the 

 earlier period of his career, one of the most important being 

 his admirable and exhaustive memoir on the Pearly Nautilus, 

 founded on the dissection of a specimen of this, at that time 

 exceedingly rare, animal sent to him in spirit by his friend 

 Dr. George Bennett, of Sydney. This was illustrated by care- 

 fully executed drawings by his own hand, and published in 

 the year 1832, when he was only twenty-seven years of age. 

 The Cephalopoda continued to engage his attention, and the 

 merits of a memoir on fossil Belemnites from the Oxford Clay, 

 published in the Philosophical Transactions in 1844, was the 

 cause assigned for the award to him of the Koyal Medal in 

 1846. He contributed the article "Cephalopoda," to the 

 Cyclopaedia of Anatomy and Physiology (1836), catalogued the 

 extinct Cephalopoda in the Museum of the Eoyal College of 

 Surgeons (1856), and wrote original papers on Clavagella 

 (1834), Trichina spiralis (1835), Linguatula (1835), Distoma 

 (1835), Spondylus (1838), Euplectella (1841), Terebratula (in 

 the introduction to Davidson's classical Monograph of the 

 British Fossil Brachiopods, 1853), and many other subjects, 

 including the well-known essay on " Parthenogenesis, or the 

 Successive Production of Procreating Individuals from a Single 

 Ovum" (1849). 



In 1843 his Lectures on the Comparative Anatomy and 

 Physiology of the Invertebrate Animals, in the form of notes 

 taken by his pupil, Mr. W. White Cooper, appeared as a 

 separate work. Of this, a second expanded and revised edition 

 was published in 1855. By this time, as the Eoyal Society's 

 Catalogue of Scientific Papers shows, he had been the author 

 of as many as 250 separate scientific memoirs. 



In 1856, when Owen had reached the zenith of his fame, 

 and was recognised throughout Europe as the first anatomist 

 of the day, a change came over his career. Difficulties with 

 the governing body of the College of Surgeons, arising from 

 his impatience at being required to perform what he considered 

 the lower administrative duties of his office, caused him readily 

 to take advantage of an offer from the Trustees of the British 

 Museum to undertake a newly -created post, that of Super- 



