February 23, 1895.] 



SCIENCE. 



213 



Lej'tlig, the founili'i-s of modern histology. 

 He was a closet naturalist, made no collec- 

 tions with his own liands, was not a field 

 paleontologist ; and his travels were rather 

 for health and recreation than for study or 

 exploration. The vast collections which 

 poured in upon him from South America, 

 Australia and New Zealand, as well as 

 from his own land, occupied his working- 

 hours and energies decade after decade, 

 until the passing years left him stranded on 

 the shores of a world of ideas and modes of 

 cooking now subsiding beneath the incom- 

 ing flood of modern methods and theories. 



And yet, his philosophic grasp and sug- 

 gestive mind exhilnted in his treatment 

 of the subject of parthenogenesis, in his 

 essay on the subject which appeared in 1849, 

 and in which he has, as Huxley states, an- 

 ticipated the theory of germ-plasm of 

 Weismann, are qualities of genius, and 

 prove what he might have produced, had 

 he received anj' training along the lines of 

 embrj'ology and cell-doctrines. 



'•Owen, in fact," says Huxley, '"got no 

 further towards the solution of this W(mder- 

 ful and difficult prol)lem than Morren and 

 others had done before him. But it is an 

 interesting circumstance that the leading 

 idea of ' Parthenogenesis," namely, that sex- 

 less proliferation is, in some way, depend- 

 ent upon the presence in the prolifying re- 

 gion, of relatively unaltered descendants of 

 the primary impregnated embryo cell (A + 

 B) is at the bottom of most of the attempts 

 which liave recently been made to deal with 

 the question. The theory of the continuity 

 of germ-plasm of Weismann, for example, 

 is practically the same as Owen's, if we 

 omit from the latter the notion tliat the en- 

 dowment with ' si)ermatic force ' is the in- 

 dispensaljle condition of proliferation." 



Owen's greatest works, those of most last- 

 ing value, in vertebrate zoology were, as 

 pointed out l)y Huxley, besides his memoir 

 oil the anatomy of Xautilus, his work on 



Odontography, his papers on the anthropoid 

 apes, on the aye-aye, on Monotremes, and on 

 Marsupials, as well as on Apteryx, the great 

 auk, tlie Dodo, and Dinornis, as well as Lepi- 

 dosiren, while chief among his essays on 

 fossil mammals were those on Mylodon, Me- 

 gatherium, Glji^todon, etc. He also pro- 

 posed the orders of Theriodouta (Anomo- 

 dontia), Diuosauria, and Pterosauria, and 

 as early as 18.'?9, as Zittel states, " he began 

 liis long series of fundamental works which 

 continued to appear for half a century, and 

 which laid the foundation for all later re- 

 searclies on fossil reptiles." He also revised 

 the classification of the Ungulates, his divi- 

 sions of odd and even-toed Ungulates being 

 well founded and generally accepted. 



Unlike Cu-\der and others, Owen labored 

 without the aid of trained assistants ; he 

 did his own work unassisted. And here 

 arises the question how far he was indebted 

 to Cuvier for his methods of work. It is 

 generally supposed and stated that Owen 

 studied in Paris under Cuvier, and that 

 " Cuvier and his collections made a great 

 impression on Owen, and gave a direction 

 to his after studies of fo.ssil remains." But 

 his biographer explicitly states that he onlj^ 

 made a brief visit to Cuvier in July, 1831, 

 and gives us the following account of his in- 

 tercourse with the great French anatomist : 

 " His rough diary, which he kept during his 

 stay at Paris, seldom mentions the fossil 

 vertebrate collection, and shows that his 

 interviews with Baron Cuvier were for the 

 most part of a purely social character. It 

 notes, for example, that he attended pretty 

 regularly Cuvier's soirees, held on Saturday 

 evenings, and that he enjoyed the music. 

 With the diarj' agree his letters. Both de- 

 vote page after page to the sights and amuse- 

 ments of Paris. Owen, in fact, seems to 

 have regarded tliis stay at Paris as an ex- 

 ceedingly^ l)leasant and entertaining holiday. 

 At the .same time it is impossible to form a 

 just estimate of Owen's work without tak- 



