384 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



over the forefathers of an English Partridge, save in very few 

 parts of the island. 



I cannot conclude without recalling that the past year has 

 witnessed the severance of the last link with the pre-Darwinian 

 naturalists in the death of Sir Kichard Owen. Though never 

 himself a field-worker, or the discoverer of a single animal living 

 or extinct, his career extends over the whole history of palae- 

 ontology. I say palaeontology, for he was not a geologist in the 

 sense of studying the order, succession, area, structure, and dis- 

 turbance of strata. But he accumulated facts on the fossil 

 remains that came to his hands, till he won the fame of being the 

 greatest comparative anatomist of the age. To him we owe the 

 building up of the skeletons of the giant Dinornithidce, and many 

 other of the perished forms of the gigantic Sloths, Armadilloes, 

 and Mastodons of South America, Australia, and Europe. He 

 was himself a colossal worker, and he never worked for popu- 

 larity. He had lived and worked too long before the Victorian 

 age to accept readily the doctrines which have revolutionised that 

 science, though none has had a larger share in accumulating the 

 facts, the combination of which of necessity produced that trans- 

 formation. But, though he clung fondly to his old idea of the 

 archetype, no man did more than Owen to explode the rival 

 theories of both Wernerians and Huttonians, till the contro- 

 versies of Plutonians and Neptunians come to us from the far 

 past with as little to move our interest as the blue and green 

 controversies of Constantinople. 



Nor can we forget that it is to Sir Richard's indomitable per- 

 severance that we owe the magnificent palace which contains the 

 national collections in Cromwell Road. For many years he 

 fought the battle almost alone. His demand for a building of two 

 stories, covering five acres, was denounced as audacious. The 

 scheme was pronounced foolish, crazy, and extravagant ; but, 

 after twenty years' struggle, he was victorious, and in 1872 the 

 Act was passed which gave not five, but more than seven acres 

 for the purpose. Owen retired from its direction in 1883, having 

 achieved the crowning victory of his life. Looking back in his 

 old age on the scientific achievements of the past, he fully recog- 

 nised the prospects of still further advances, and observed, " The 

 known is very small compared with the knowable, and we may 

 trust in the Author of all truth, who, I think, will not let that 

 truth remain for ever hidden." 



