lo 
PROFESSOR OWEN 
CH. I. 
and were beginning to think they had better let 
the question of fees pass and go off empty handed, 
when Owen, displaying a considerable share of 
ready assurance, stepped forward and coolly 
began from the Latin Grammar, ‘ Propria quae 
manbus tribuuntur mascula dicas,’ &c. That 
was quite enough. The farmer handed over 
his fee with great satisfaction, and Owen achieved 
a cheap reputation amongst those who were 
present as classical scholar of the school. 
‘ At this period of his life,’ so his last surviv- 
ing sister would relate, ‘ Richard was very small 
and slight and exceedingly mischievous, and he 
hardly grew at all till he was sixteen.’ His 
family were evidently apprehensive— like Mrs. 
Wilfer’s mamma— that it would end by his being 
a small man. But he soon began to make up 
for his early want of stature, and when he left 
the Grammar School he was already a big 
awkward lad. 
At the age of fourteen Richard Owen had 
given no signs of a taste for the work to which 
his life was afterwards devoted. Part of a manu- 
script treatise on Heraldry still exists, wLich he 
wrote about this time, as well as an elaborately 
painted coat of arms of the Owen and Eskrigge 
family, with ‘ R.O. del., i8i8,’ in the corner. He 
thus alludes to this work of art : ‘ My earliest 
hobby was Heraldry, and a friend of my mother’s, 
by name Miss Taylor, who was sister of the then 
