376 RICHARD OWEN xxn 



ful. The lecture theatre, which he had throughout urged with 

 great pertinacity as a necessary accompaniment to a natural 

 history museum, was, as he says in the address referred to 

 above, " erased from my plan, and the elementary courses of 

 lectures remain for future fulfilment." 



On several other important questions of museum arrange- 

 ment Owen allowed his views, even when essentially philo- 

 sophical as well as practical, to be overruled. As long ago as 

 December 1841, he submitted to the Museum Committee of 

 the Eoyal College of Surgeons the question of incorporating 

 in one catalogue and system of arrangement the fossil bones of 

 extinct animals with the specimens of recent osteology, and 

 shortly afterwards laid before the Committee a report pointing 

 out the advantages of such a plan. Strangely enough, though 

 receiving the formal approval of the Council, no steps were 

 taken to carry it out as long as he w r as at the College. He 

 returned to the question in reference to the arrangement of 

 the new National Museum, and although no longer advocating 

 so complete an incorporation of the two series, apparently in 

 consideration of the interests of the division into " depart- 

 ments " which he found in existence there, he says, " The 

 department of Zoology in such a museum should be so located 

 as to afford the easiest transit from the specimens of existing 

 to those of extinct animals. The geologist specially devoted 

 to the study of the evidence of extinct vegetation ought, in 

 like manner, to have means of comparing his fossils with the 

 collections of recent plants." l Provision for such an arrange- 

 ment is clearly indicated in all the early plans for the build- 

 ing, in which the space for the different subjects is allocated, 

 but not a trace of it remained in the final disposition of the 

 contents of the museum, as Owen left it in 1883. 



Another essential feature of Owen's original plan, without 

 which, he says, " No collection of zoology can be regarded as 

 complete," is a gallery of physical ethnology, the size of which 

 he estimated (in 1862) at 150 ft. in length by 50 ft. in 

 width. It was to contain casts of the entire body, coloured 

 after life, of characteristic parts as the head and face, 



1 On the Extent and Aims of a National Museum of Natural History, 2nd 

 edit. 1852, p. 7. 



