374 RICHARD OWEN xxn 



and he acted as chairman of the jury on raw materials, 

 alimentary substances, etc., and published an elaborate report 

 on their awards. He also delivered to the Society of Arts a 

 lecture on " Eaw Animal Products, and their Uses in Manu- 

 facture." Similar services were performed by him for the 

 Exposition Universelle of Paris in 1858. 



It has been already said that Owen took scarcely any part 

 in the details of the administration of the British Museum, 

 but one subject relating to that establishment did largely 

 engage his attention from his first connection with it. That 

 the accommodation afforded by the rooms devoted to natural 

 history in the Museum at Bloomsbury was painfully in- 

 adequate for the purpose was evident to him as well as to 

 every one else. Space must be obtained somewhere, even for 

 the proper conservation and display of the existing collections, 

 to say nothing of the vast additions that must be expected if 

 the subject were to be represented in anything like the way 

 in which it deserved to be in his eyes, and Owen in this 

 respect had very large views. The scientific public, the 

 officers of the Museum, and the Trustees, were much divided 

 as to whether it would be better to endeavour to obtain this 

 space in the neighbourhood of the existing Museum, or to 

 remove a portion of the collection to a totally distinct locality. 

 After some apparent hesitation, Owen threw himself strongly 

 on the side of those who took the latter view, being the one 

 which seemed to him to have the best chance of leading to a 

 successful result, and he strongly urged upon the Government, 

 and upon the public generally, in annual museum returns, 

 lectures, and pamphlets, the desirability of the scheme. In 

 his address as President of the Biological Section of the British 

 Association at the York meeting in 1881, he has given a 

 history of the part he took in promoting the building of the 

 new museum at South Kensington, including his success in 

 enlisting the sympathy of Mr. Gladstone, by whose powerful 

 aid the difficulties and opposition with which the plan was 

 met in Parliament were mainly overcome. His earlier views 

 upon the subject are fully explained in a small work entitled 

 On the Extent and Aims of a National Museum of Natural 

 History, published in 1862, being an expansion of the lecture 



