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PORTRAIT GALLERY.

RICHARD OWEN, F R.S., F.G.S., ETC.

We now give a brief sketch of the life and works of a man who stands out pre-eminent in the present day, as an example of what can be accomplished in the walks of science by unaided genius. Born in a humble station in life, he possessed not the advantages that wealth and birth confer; but, by the powers of his mind, joined to a persevering industry, he has obtained a position in the scientific world which any man might justly be proud to acquire; and which others with far greater advantages have sought in vain. He is not only honoured by all ranks in his own country, but has acquired a world-wide reputation; and such is the modest and kindly way in which he has always given utterance to his views, that he has attained that honourable but rare position, when even those with whose opinions it has been his lot to come into collision cannot find it in their hearts to say one word against him. Surely the career of such a man is one that will be read with interest by every lover of science; and his example cannot fail to stir up a spirit of noble emulation and determined perseverance in the breast of many a one who is now in silence pursuing his way, amidst many disadvantages, as a humble votary of science.

It was in the good old town of Lancaster that Richard Owen was born; and there he passed his early years. While still a youth, he commenced the study of surgery, and pursued it with considerable ardour; not, however, from any love which he then had for such a study, but because that course appeared to him the only one by which he should be able to follow a seafaring life, which was the darling wish of his heart: for at that time a preference was always given, in the navy, to youths who had studied this subject. He had been a midshipman on board a ship-of-war; but at the close of the American struggle had been obliged to return home; and then it was that he devoted himself to the study of surgery, and served under the surgeon to the county jail at Lancaster. In 1824, Owen matriculated at Edinburgh; and there, under the tuition of Dr Barclay, he soon displayed a decided love for comparative anatomy. The next year he removed to St Bartholomew's Hospital in London, where he speedily distinguished himself as a very promising anatomist, and attracted the notice of the celebrated Abernetby, who was then lecturing at St Bartholomew's; and he soon made young Owen one of the dissectors for his lectures.

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Even here, however, a fondness for the sea was still his ruling passion; and he applied for and obtained the office of assistant-surgeon in the navy. But, when he went to bid his instructor farewell, the good old man, in his own rough and eccentric way, manifested his affection for his young pupil, and his unwillingness that science should lose his services. When he mentioned that he was going to sea, Abernethy bluntly replied, that he had better go to the devil at once. By his representations and advice, Owen was induced to abandon his intention, and to accept a situation at the Royal College of Surgeons, of which he had been admitted a member in 1826. Abernethy procured for him the appointment to assist Mr Clift, who was then conservator of the museum of the college, in drawing up a catalogue of the Hunterian specimens, and upon this employment he entered in 1827, at a salary of £80 a-year. He assisted Mr Clift in preparing the Descriptive Catalogue of the Pathological Specimens, and that of the Monsters and Malformations, which were published in three quarto volumes. Some time after this he was made joint-conservator with Mr Clift, whose daughter he married; and, in 1835, was appointed Hunterian Professor to the college. His father-in-law being a near relative to John Hunter, Mr Owen became by this marriage a member of the Hunterian family; by which the charge and completion of the museum has fallen into the hands of one of the family of its great founder. Thus was this pro

mising young man rescued from the sea, and placed in that very position where he would have the most abundant scope for the development of those talents which have since won for him the highest renown.

Since Mr Owen has been conservator of the museum, it has been wonderfully improved in practical value. It was by the labours of that extraordinary man, John Hunter, that the collection of anatomical and physiological speci mens in this museum was made; and no one can inspect it, even in the most cursory manner, without being struck with surprise that so Herculean a task should have been accomplished by any one man, as that which such a collection must have proved; especially when the tedious and elaborate dissections which most of those specimens involved are taken into account. The great work of Mr Owen, in reference to this collection, has been the preparation of the Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Physiological Series of Specimens. This work, extending to five quarto volumes, and giving a description of nearly 4000 Hunterian specimens, besides the large number of recent additions, was a work absolutely necessary before the collection could be practically useful to others. Hunter had himself habitually trusted to memory for the history of the individual specimens; and it was not till near the close of his life, when he felt the powers of his hitherto retentive memory beginning to fail, that he became fully alive to the importance of their being completely catalogued. To compile an efficient catalogue, was the prime object he aimed to accomplish in the closing period of his life, and under his superintendence a MS. catalogue was commenced; but it devolved upon Mr Owen to complete the work. This he has done in a manner which reflects the highest credit upon himself, and upon the council of the college under whose auspices it was effected. It is by no means a mere dry list of names or of curt descriptions; but contains a full account of everything that is interesting or important in the history of the various specimens. It is a work that affords to the student a large amount of valuable information, and unfolds to him much of the philosophy of the science of comparative anatomy; and, even to the casual visiter, is a most interesting companion in his progress through the museum. This catalogue is founded on the MS. lectures of Hunter and the notes of his dissections, on the MS. catalogue already in part produced, and on the original researches of Mr Owen himself. In its preparation, great difficulty was experienced in consequence of a large portion of Hunter's papers having been committed to the flames by his executor, Sir Everard Home; whence it happened that a vast number of the specimens were found to be altogether undescribed and even unnamed, so that very many dissections were required to be made before the specimens could be catalogued, or their accuracy in many instances relied on. Many important specimens have been added by Mr Owen from time to time; and thus, under his fostering care, this fine collection has continually become more and more complete.

Almost wholly through the labours of Mr Owen, a new department of the museum has grown into importance. This is the department of osteology; at which he bas laboured with untiring zeal, until it has become the noblest collection of osteological specimens in the world. He has also contributed largely to the department of specimens in illustration of natural history; and has prepared catalogues descriptive of these, and also of the specimens in fossil osteology. Both these are works of great value, and involved considerable labour; but his description of the fossil remains of mammalia and birds in the museum is in particular a work of great scientific value, containing a large amount of matter of the greatest interest in the science of paleontology.

We have dwelt thus long upon his labours in behalf of this museum, because it is in connection with this that most of his works have been executed. It is here that those specimens are placed by which he gained renown. Here he has shown himself a worthy successor of John Hunter, and has gained for himself a name which will go

down to posterity coupled with that of his great forerunner, as one of the founders of that noble collection.

It was whilst Mr Owen was assistant conservator to the museum, that the celebrated specimen of the pearly nautilus (Nautilus pompilius, Linn.) was presented to the Royal College of Surgeons by Sir Edward Belcher. This was the first specimen that had ever been brought to Europe; and it, therefore, became an object of great interest. Mr Owen was commissioned by the council of the college to prepare a description of the animal, and this is his first published work. Both the pearly and paper nautilus were known to the ancients as far back as the time of Aristotle; but the notions they formed of their habits were altogether incorrect. Our readers will scarcely now need to be told, that the appearance of the nautilus, as with spreading sails and delicate oars it was wafted along upon the surface of the deep, and which is said to have given rise to the idea of a vessel, is no more than a poetic fiction; and that the animal crawls along at the bottom of the water, or moves through it backwards, after the manner of other cephalopods, and never swims upon its surface. The shell of the pearly nautilus has long been common enough in this country; but the animal itself had never been seen by the moderns until the present specimen was captured in 1829, in the South Seas, near the island of Erromanga. This arises from the habits of the animal in frequenting the depths of the ocean, and seldom appearing at the surface; but in the present instance the animal seems to have been surprised in its sleep. Mr Owen detailed the anatomy of this creature, and illustrated it with beautiful drawings, in a manner which gave indications of his great anatomical powers. He was also intrusted with the preparation of a memoir on the skeleton of an extinct gigantic sloth which had been discovered near Buenos Ayres in 1841. From the position in which it was found, it appeared to have been buried alive in one of the recent geological formations. It was brought to England, and purchased by the college for 300 guineas; and here, under the care of Mr Owen, its fragile bones were put together, and it now forms one of the most remarkable objects in the museum of the college. It stands at least nine feet in height, though the extreme length of the largest existing species is not more than two. The memoir contains a very complete review of the osteology of the various megatherioid animals, which, as is generally known, are peculiar to America; such as the megatherium, megalonyx, and sloths. Mr Owen believes that there were once at least five or six genera of these colossal creatures inhabiting America, all of which are now extinct. Previous to the arrival of this gigantic fossil, Mr Owen had gained great renown from the results of an examination by him of a number of fossil bones collected by Mr Darwin in Patagonia and La Plata, which belonged to animals of the orders Edentata and Pachydermata. An account of these was afterwards published under the patronage of government in a work on the voyage of H.M.S. Beagle. Among these were bones of two extinct animals, which the peculiar genius and practical skill of Mr Owen enabled him to refer to their proper place in the scale of existing animals, though of one, the Macrauchenia patagonica, he was only furnished with a few bones of the trunk and extremities; without a fragment of a tooth, or of the skull, to serve as a guide to its position in the zoological scale. For these important contributions to the science of Palæontology the Wollaston gold medal was, in 1838, awarded to the professor by the Geological Society; and, on its delivery, he was highly complimented upon his important services by the Rev. Mr Whewell, the president of the society.

In 1835, Mr Owen was appointed by the council of the college to the office of Hunterian Professor. The splendid anatomical collection which now bears the name of Hunter, and which will stand as the lasting memorial of his great skill and untiring zeal in behalf of comparative anatomy, was purchased, on his death, by Parliament, and transferred to the Royal College of Surgeons, on certain condi

tions. One of these was, that a course of lectures, net less than twenty-four in number, on comparative anatomy, illustrated by the preparations in the museum, should be given in each year by some member of the college. This was the professorship to which Mr Owen was appointed in 1835, and whose duties he still continues to perform, with distinguished success. At the commencement of his first course, he formed the plan of giving such a series of lectures as should enable him to go through the entire collection, and adequately demonstrate its nature and ex tent, with the view of offering a just tribute to the noble labours of its founder. His series of lectures occupied six years in delivery; and in them he adopted the same arrangement as that which Hunter had employed in the co lection. The specimens are there arranged according to the development of the different organs, commencing with the simplest condition in which they occur in the animal kingdom, and ascending through all their successive grades to the most complex. Accordingly, Mr Owen lectured the first three years on the comparative anatomy and phy siology of the organs of digestion, nutrition, circulation, respiration, and excretion, in their order. In 1840, be lectured on the anatomy of the generative organs, and the development of the ovum; afterwards, on the animal fune tions, with the fossil remains of extinct animals; and, lastly, on the nervous system. Thus, in the course of six years, he delivered a most complete and elaborate course of lectures on the sciences, illustrated by this great collec tion, which could not fail to be of the highest utility to those who were privileged with listening to them. But the professor perceived that such a course was too long, adequately to meet the wants of the students of the col lege. Few of them had leisure to attend so elaborate a course; he accordingly made a new arrangement, and in 1843, gave a course on the invertebrate animals, arranged according to their classes, commencing with the lowest in the scale. By this means he was enabled to compare the various grades of complexity of the different organs in the same body with one another, and to consider them in re lation to the nature and powers of the entire animal, and also in relation to the peculiar conditions under which each animal was formed to live. These Lectures were afterwards published. In 1846, appeared another volume of the Hunterian Lectures, on the Comparative Anatomy of Fishes. This is a very important work; for in it be first announces his profound and original views on some of the most difficult and abstruse theories in anatomy.

There had long been a belief that the various parts of the skeleton of any one vertebrate animal had their homelogues, or corresponding parts, in the skeleton of every other; and some splendid theories had been propounded on this subject by the great Geoffroy St Hilaire, and others. But the chief error of these anatomists lay in pushing a beautiful theory too far, by looking for a homologue to every part, which led them into strange incongruities in their reasoning; so much so, indeed, that their theories had long since been renounced as untenable. But to Mr Owen we are indebted for the announcement ji of a theory on this point, which is at once clear and prac ticable, and which has since led to the general recognition of the principle of homology. He has been enabled to point out the distinction between those structural elements which are essential to all animals of the same type, and those which are only destined to serve some special purpose in individuals. By so doing, he has succeeded in discovering the true principles of that law by which nature so beautifully and perfectly provides for the various wants of every species, by modifications of the original typical structure, rather than by the substitution of other parts for any that are essential to the type.

We shall now notice some of the works of Owen, which are less intimately connected with his office as Hunterian Professor. The first of these is a very elaborate work en Odontography, published by him in 1840. It is a trea tise on the comparative anatomy of the teeth in vertebrate animals, their physical relations, mode of development, and microscopic structure. It was published in two hand

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some quarto volumes, of which one contains upwards of
160 lithographed plates in illustration of the text. The
work comprises a very complete treatise on the teeth, in
the three classes of vertebrates which possess them, viz.,
fishes, reptiles, and mammals. It possesses little attraction
for the unprofessional reader; but we may illustrate the
great value of a thorough acquaintance with the intimate
characters of the teeth by a reference to a paper on the Struc-
ture of Fossil Teeth, read by Professor Owen before the
British Association, in which, after giving a description of
the internal organisation of teeth in the higher mammalia,
and the various modifications which this structure under-
goes in the megatherium, ichthyosaurus, and in fossil
fishes, which he illustrated by magnified transverse sec-
tions, he deduced from them, in a highly instructive and
beautiful manner, the general conclusion, that the different
genera, and probably even species, may be distinguished
by the internal structure of the teeth alone; so that, when
all other characters fail, and a complete tooth is not to be
obtained, identity may be established from even a thin
slice of a fossil tooth. Such is one of the results which
the genius of this great man has worked out from his in-pical Society, which was established in 1840, by the exer-
vestigations concerning the structure of the teeth; and it
will serve as a specimen of the services he has rendered
in the department of Fossil Osteology. It is now no longer
necessary that a single bone should be discovered entire
in order to be able to distinguish the animal to which it
belonged; but, with regard to all known animals, this
may be determined from an examination of the mere frag-

ment of a tooth.

Mr Owen has likewise contributed two other valuable works to this department of science; one is 'An Account of the Fossil Mammalia and Birds of Great Britain,' which was published in one volume octavo in 1846; and the other a History of British Fossil Reptiles,' of which only five parts have yet appeared. Some time back, the British Association for the Advancement of Science had requested Mr Owen to undertake a series of special researches on the fossil remains of Great Britain; and by the valuable aid which this association afforded, and the assistance he derived from many gentlemen who possessed private collections, he was enabled to carry out his researches in a very complete manner. The result was the publication of the volume referred to, which formed one of a series of works in course of publication by Mr Van Voorst on the Zoology of the British Isles. The object of the book, as its author modestly asserts, was to aid those collectors of fossils in determining the nature and value of their acquisitions, to whom the larger works on Paleontology, Osteology, and Geology, were inaccessible; but this work really takes a much higher position, and is indeed one of great interest and value even to the readers of those larger treatises. It contains a description of every species known up to the publication of the book. In the introduction, he gives a very interesting account of the past history of the world, and particularly of the land which now forms the British Isles; a history which goes back into the remotest ages, and includes the whole period of the geological changes of this land, and its submersions beneath the waters of the ocean, thus furnishing us with a system of chronology which goes back to a period far anterior to those of history or tradition, even to the first dawn of life upon our planet. It is exceedingly interesting to observe how beautifully this history is derived, from evidence afforded entirely by the organic remains which exist in the various geological strata.

e chief error of these att utiful theory too far, by Tery part, which led the heir reasoning; so much s id long since been renounet ist 1 we are indebted for his point, which is at any cart ch has since led to the rece of homology. He bes istinction between the essential to all animal are only destined to r iduals. By so doing b principles of that lay d perfectly provides fir by modifications of r than by the susta essential to the type notice some of the work 'y connected with his first of these is a TOTA published by him in arative anatomy of the da bysical relations midd structure. It was pa

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In 1848, Mr Owen produced his work on the Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton,' in which he embodies the results of years of research, the earliest of which had been already given in his lectures, as Hunterian Professor, on the Osteology of Fishes; and the latter he had communicated in a paper read before the British Association in 1846. In this work, which entitles its author to the very highest position as a scientific anatomist, he has given a critical and comprehensive history of the opinions that have been held on the subject of homologies, from the time of the German Professor Oken,

The last production of Professor Owen is that on 'Parthenogenesis, or the Successive Production of Procreating Individuals from a Single Ovum.' But, besides these, his published works, we have full evidence that his labours have been unremitting in the cause of science, by the vast number of papers which he has read before the various learned societies, to which the Transactions of the Royal Society, the British Association, the Geological Society, &c., bear ample testimony. His life has indeed been one of laborious and useful service in behalf of science; and he well deserves the opinion which is now universal, That no individual has contributed so much to create and sustain, in this and other countries, an elevated taste for anatomical research as Professor Owen.' But, while thus active in the more legitimate duties of his profession, he has still found time to be of service to the world in other ways. He was one of the founders of the Microscotions of a few scientific men, for the purpose of furthering that important branch of science, microscopical research. He was the first who occupied the presidential chair of this society; and, at its first meeting, communicated a paper on the structure of fossil teeth. He was likewise one of the commissioners appointed by her Majesty in 1843 for inquiring into the state of large towns and populous districts, with a view to active measures being taken to improve the health of towns. He was a zealous member of the commission appointed in 1849 to make inquiries relating to Smithfield Market, and to the state and management of all the London markets for the sale of meat; and cordially joined in the recommendation for the removal of Smithfield. He was the only medical man on this commission, and personally took great interest in the inquiry; and he himself gave important evidence as a witness on the subject before a select committee of the House of Commons. He also manifested a deep interest in the objects of the Great Exhibition, and heartily laboured in its cause. He was one of the associate jurors in the class for miscellaneous manufactures, and was chairman of the jury on vegetable and animal substances used in manufactures; and has since delivered one of the lectures on the results of the Exhibition, at the house of the Society of Arts.

In thus enumerating the works of Professor Owen, we have only been able to name the points upon which his unwearied industry and singular address have contributed to throw light. Those who would wish to follow out his arguments more completely are referred to his works, and, more particularly, to the Hunterian Lectures, and the discourse on the Nature of Limbs, which may be read with great interest and profit by any one possessing an ordinary acquaintance with anatomical and physiological terms.

Although Mr Owen has now gained such a position that men of all ranks delight to do him honour, this was not always the case. He has in his time had to endure the sneers of envy and professional prejudice. In the delivery of his early lectures, he was taunted upon their extreme simplicity. It was declared to be a waste of time to listen to his simple demonstrations, from which even the veriest tyro could learn nothing. He was accused of a want of modesty in delivering opinions which ran counter to those of the greatest anatomists; but surely, if truth is to be attained, a man must not be scared from the enunciation of his well-digested views by the splendour of the names of those who have thought otherwise; and all who know Mr Owen will say, that, if there is one virtue he possesses in a greater degree than another, it is undoubtedly that of modesty. There was also great fault found with him for devoting himself so completely to the departments of comparative anatomy and fossil osteology, and neglecting the more practical study of medicine; but the advantages of the course he adopted have since become so fully apparent,

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