210 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. I. No. 8. 



By the Right Hon. T. H. Huxley, F. 



E. S. Portraits and illustrations. In 



two volumes. New York, D. Appleton 



& Co. 1894. Pp. 409, 393. $7.50. 



The life of the great English comparative 

 anatomist as told in these volumes was in 

 many respects an ideal one. It is the old 

 story of a self-made man, who, without the 

 advantages of good preparatory schools, or 

 of the university life at Cambridge or Ox- 

 ford, by his own native ability and industrj', 

 as well as by his kindly disposition and social 

 tact, rose to the highest scientific position in 

 Great Britain, came to be the friend of some 

 of England's leading statesmen, of her great- 

 est poets and novelists ; the recipient of 

 marked favors from the Queen ; living to 

 see the completion of the magnificent na- 

 tural history museum at South Kensington 

 planned by himself, and dying at the great 

 age of eighty-eight years, during sixty of 

 which he published the long series of mono- 

 graphs and general works which form his 

 most enduring monument. 



This biography, as prepared by his grand- 

 son largely from Owen's letters and diary 

 and those of his wife, even if it includes 

 what may be thought to be many trivial 

 details, gives what seems to us to be a most 

 arttractive and life-like sketch of the man. 

 "We see Owen, not only in his study at the 

 College of Surgeons and afterwards at the 

 British Museum, but also at his home in the 

 little rambling thatched cottage in Rich- 

 mond Park, presented him by the Qvieen. 

 We also catch glimpses of his club life, of 

 his success as an administrator, as a lec- 

 turer, as a literateur ; we are given evi- 

 dences of his fondness for art and music 

 and the drama, as well as poetry, and ac- 

 counts of his journeys over the continent 

 and up the Nile. 



It is a record not of a scientific recluse, 

 but of one who had many outside interests, 

 and who lived in touch with the best minds 

 and the best thought of his time. 



Richard Owen was born in 1804 at Lan- 

 caster, the son of a merchant. After leaving 

 the grammar school, he was M'hen sixteen 

 apprenticed to a surgeon, and when twenty 

 matriculated at Edinburgh University as a 

 medical student. Six j^ears after he became 

 prosector to Dr. Abernethy in London and 

 assistant curator of the Hunterian Collection 

 at the College of Surgeons, and in 1856 was 

 appointed superintendent of the Natural 

 Historj^ collections of the British Museum, 

 a position created for him and which he held 

 until shortly before his death. 



His first paper was published in 1830, 

 and two years later his famous memoir on 

 the pearly nautilus. This at once gave 

 him a national and continental reputation 

 as a comparative anatomist of the first rank. 

 Huxley makes the generous claim, in 

 referring to the work, that there is 

 nothing better in Cuvier's ' Memoires sur les 

 Mollusques,' and he adds: " Certainly in the 

 sixtj' years that have elapsed since the 

 pubUcation of this remarkable monograph, 

 it has not been excelled, and that is a good 

 deal to say with MiiUer's ' Mj^xinoid Fishes ' 

 for a competitor." Owen's last work (the 

 list of the entire series of articles, mono- 

 graphs and general works embracing 647 

 titles) appeared in 1889. What a record ! 

 Sixty years of almost uninterrupted health, 

 of unexamj)led productiveness, of accurate, 

 j)ainstaking, honest labor. 



Owen's place in biological science, a 

 science which has widened and deepened 

 so immeasurably since the date of publica- 

 tion of his first great work in 1832, is not 

 altogether easy to determine, but the task 

 is much lightened by the appreciative and 

 magnanimous essay by Professor Huxley on 

 Owen's position in Anatomical Science, 

 placed at the end of the biogTaphj\ 



Owen was called by some of his contem- 

 poraries ' the British Cuvier,' and this fairly 

 well expresses his position. He may be said 

 to have lived in the interregnum between 



