4 8 PROFESSOR OWEN CH n. 



cured for actual and prospective requirements of 

 our National Museum of Natural History. 



' Mr. Gladstone, adhering to the convictions 

 which led him to submit his financial proposition 

 of May 1862, honoured me, at the close of that 

 session of Parliament, with an invitation to Ha- 

 warden to discuss my plans for the museum 

 building ; and, after consideration of every detail, 

 he requested that they might be left with him. 

 He placed them, with my written expositions of 

 details, in the hands of Sir Henry A. Hunt, C.B., 

 responsible adviser on buildings, &c, at the Office 

 of Works, with instructions that they should be put 

 into working form, so as to support reliable esti- 

 mates of cost. I was favoured with interviews 

 with Sir Henry, resulting in the completion of 

 such working plans of a museum, including a cen- 

 tral hall, an architectural front of two stories, and 

 the series of single-storied galleries extending at 

 right angles to the front, as shown in my original 

 Plan. I was assured that such plan of building, 

 affording the space I had reported on, would be 

 the basis to be submitted to the professional 

 architect whenever the time might arrive for 

 Parliamentary sanction to the cost of such 

 building. 



' Here I may remark that experiments which 

 preceded the substitution, in 1835, °f tne actual 

 Museum of the Hunterian Physiology at the 

 Royal College of Surgeons, for the costly, cum- 



