PROFESSOR OWEN ch. vm. 



CHAPTER VIII 



1845 



Owen's Opinion of the 'Vestiges of Creation' — His Descriptive 

 Catalogue of Fossil Mammalia — Election to 'The Club' — 

 Refusal of the offer of Knighthood — Visit to Turner the 

 Painter — Meeting of the Italian Naturalists at Naples. 



A remarkably advanced scientific book ap- 

 peared in the year 1844, entitled 'Vestiges of 

 the Natural History of Creation.' ] It was 

 published anonymously, and for forty years the 

 secret of its authorship was unknown. The 

 book was variously ascribed to Thackeray, 

 Lady Lovelace, Sir Charles Lyell, George 



1 The author of the Vestiges not of any immediate or personal 

 of Creatio?i gave a sketch of the exertion on the part of the 

 geological history of the earth, Deity, but of natural laws which 

 followed by Considerations on are expressions of His will ;' 'the 

 the Origin of the Animated whole train of animated beings, 

 Tribes, and endeavoured to show from the simplest and oldest, up 

 ' throughout the geological his- to the highest and most recent, 

 tory strong traces of a parallel are, then, to be regarded as a 

 advance of the physical con- series of advances of the principle 

 ditions and the organic forms ; ' of development, which have de- 

 ' that the construction of this pended upon external physical 

 globe and its associates, and circumstances, to which the 

 inferentially that of all the other resulting animals are appro- 

 globes of space, was the result, priate.' 



