48 
PROFESSOR OWEN 
CH II. 
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, of the actual 
Museum of the Hunterian Physiology at the 
Royal College of Surgeons, for the costly, cum- 
