306 OWEN'S POSITION IN 



bear his name. This was a pretty good start lor 

 a young man of twenty-six to make ; but the har- 

 vest of the year 1832 bettered that of its prede- 

 cessor. For, without any other work, Owen's 

 time might, one would think, have been fully 

 occupied by the famous ' Memoir on the Pearly 

 Nautilus,' which was published in 1832 and placed 

 its author, at a bound, in the front rank of ana- 

 tomical monographers. There is nothing better 

 in the ' Memoires sur les Mollusques,' I would 

 even venture to say nothing so good, were it not 

 that Owen had Cuvier's great work for a model ; 

 certainly, in the sixty years that have elapsed 

 since the publication of this remarkable mono- 

 graph, it has not been excelled ; and that is a 

 good deal to say with Mtiller's ' Myxinoid Fishes ' 

 for a competitor. 



During more than half a century, Owen's in- 

 dustry remained unabated ; and whether we con- 

 sider the quantity, or the quality, of the work done, 

 or the wide range of his labours, I doubt if, in the 

 long annals of anatomy, more is to be placed to 

 the credit of any single worker. 



The preparation of the five volumes of the de- 

 scriptive catalogue of the Hunterian Museum 

 and of the annual courses of lectures demanded 

 from the Hunterian Professor, took Owen over 

 the length and breadth of the animal kingdom 

 and involved the making of special investigations 

 in almost all its provinces. The wide knowledge 



