3o6 
OWEN’S POSITION IN 
bear his name. This was a pretty good start tor 
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 fampus ‘ 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 Muller’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 
I 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 
