45 
1856-81 OWEN’S ANNUAL REPORTS 
had shaken my faith in the grounds on which my 
Report and Plan of 1859 had been based. e 
facts bearing thereupon, which it was my duty to 
submit in my “ Annual Reports on the Natural 
History Departments of the British Museum, 
Would, I still hoped, have some influence with 
hon. members of the legislature to whom those 
■■eports are transmitted. 
‘ The annual additions of specimens continued 
to increase in number and in value year by year. 
I embraced every opportunity to excite the in- 
terest of lovers of natural history travelling abroad, 
and of intelligent settlers in our several colonies, 
to this end, among the results of which I may 
oite the reception of the aye-aye, the gorilla, 
the dodo, the notornis, the maximised and ele- 
phant-footed species of dinornis, the representa- 
tives of the various orders and genera of extinct 
Reptilia from the Cape of Good Hope, and the 
equally rich and numerous evidences of the ex- 
tinct Marsupialia from Australia, besides such 
smaller rarities as the animals of the nautilus and 
Spirilla. 
‘Wherever room could be found m the ex- 
hibition galleries at Bloomsbury for these sped 
mens, stuffed or as articulated skeletons, or as 
detached fossils, they were squeezed in, so to 
speak, to manifest mutely to all visitors, more 
especially administrative ones, the state of cram 
to which we were driven at Bloomsbury. 
