OBITUARY NOTICES OF FELLOWS DECEASED.

RICHARD OWEN was born at Lancaster on July 20, 1804. His father, whose name was also Richard, was engaged in business connected with the West Indies. His mother's name was Catherine Parrin. He was educated at the Grammar School at Lancaster (where one of his schoolfellows was W. Whewell, afterwards Master of Trinity), apprenticed to a surgeon of the name of Harrison in that town, and studied surgery at the County Hospital. No evidence can now be found for the statement which has appeared in many biographical notices that when a boy he went to sea as a midshipman, nor is there any that at a later period he had an intention to enter the medical service of the Navy, or applied for and obtained an appointment, as has also been stated.

In 1824 he matriculated at the University of Edinburgh, and had the good fortune to attend the anatomical course of Dr. Barclay, then approaching the close of a successful career as an extra academical lecturer, whose teaching was of a very superior order to that of the third Monro, who, by virtue of hereditary influences, happened at that time to be the University Professor of Anatomy. In his work' On the Nature of Limbs,' Owen refers to "the extensive knowledge of comparative anatomy possessed by my revered preceptor in anatomy, Dr. Barclay," and always spoke of him with affectionate regard.

He did not remain in Edinburgh to take his degree, but removed to St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London, and passed the examination for the membership of the Royal College of Surgeons on August 18, 1826.

His first published scientific works were in the direction of surgical pathology, being on encysted calculus of the urinary bladder and on the effects of ligature of the internal iliac artery for the cure of aneurism.

At St. Bartholomew's Hospital he soon attracted the attention of the celebrated Abernethy, through whose influence he obtained the appointment of Assistant Conservator to the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. This was in 1827, and it caused him to abandon the prospect of private practice, to which he had begun to devote himself while living in Serle Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, for the more congenial pursuit of comparative anatomy. The Conservator of VOL. Ly, b

the Museum at that time was William Clift, John Hunter's last and most devoted pupil and assistant, under whose faithful guardianship the collection had been most carefully preserved during the long interval between the death of its founder and its transference to the custody of the College of Surgeons. From him, Owen early imbibed an enthusiastic reverence for his great master, which was continually augmented with the closer study of his collection and works, which now became the principal duty of his life. In 1830 and 1831 he visited Paris, where he attended the lectures of Cuvier and Geoffroy St. Hilaire, and worked in the dissecting rooms and public galleries of the Jardin des Plantes. In 1835 he married Clift's only daughter, Caroline, and in 1842 was associated with him as joint Conservator of the Museum. On Clift's retirement soon after, he became sole Conservator, with Mr. J. T. Quekett as Assistant.

He was appointed Hunterian Professor of Comparative Anatomy and Physiology in 1835, an office which he held until his retirement from the College in 1856, and from which he took the title of "Professor Owen," by which he was far more widely known than by the knightly addition of his later years.

Until the year 1852, when the Queen gave him the charming cottage called Sheen Lodge in Richmond Park, where he resided to the end of his life, he occupied small apartments within the building of the College of Surgeons; these, however inconvenient they might be in some respects, furnished him with unusual facilities for pursuing his work by night as well as day in the museum, dissecting rooms, and library, of that institution.

Owen's life of scientific activity may be divided into two periods, during each of which the nature of his work was determined to a considerable extent by the circumstances by which he was environed. Each of these periods embraces a term of very nearly thirty years. The first, from 1827 to 1856, was spent at the Royal College of Surgeons; the second, from 1856 to 1884, in the British Museum. It was in the first that he mainly made his great reputation as an anatomist, having utilised to the fullest possible extent the opportunities which were placed in his way by the care of the Hunterian Museum. For many years he worked in that institution under the happiest of auspices. From the routine and drudgery which always take up so large a portion of the time of a conscientious museum curator, he was relieved by the painstaking, methodical, William Clift; the far more gifted son-in-law being thus able to throw himself to his heart's content into the higher work of the office. This at first mainly consisted in the preparation of that monumental Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Physiological Series of Comparative Anatomy,' founded upon Hunter's preparations, largely added to by Owen himself, which was published in five quarto volumes between the

years 1833 and 1840.

This work, which has been taken as a model for many other subsequently published catalogues, contains a minute description of nearly four thousand preparations. The labour involved in preparing it was greatly increased by the circumstance that the origin of a large number of them had not been preserved, and even the species of the animals from which they were derived had to be discovered by tedious researches among old documents, or by comparison with fresh dissections. It was mainly to aid him in this work that he engaged upon the long series of dissections of animals which died from time to time in the Gardens of the Zoological Society, the descriptions of which, as published in the Proceedings and Transactions of the Society, form a precious fund of information upon the comparative anatomy of the higher Vertebrates. The series commences with an account of the anatomy of an Orang Utan, which was communicated to the first scientific meeting of the Society, held on the evening of Tuesday, November 9, 1830, and was continued with descriptions of dissections of the Beaver, Suricate, Acouchy, Thibet Bear, Gannet, Crocodile, Armadillo, Seal, Kangaroo, Tapir, Toucan, Flamingo, Hyrax, Hornbill, Cheetah, Capybara, Pelican, Kinkajou, Wombat, Giraffe, Dugong, Apteryx, Wart-hog, Walrus, Great Ant-eater, and many others.

Among the many obscure subjects in anatomy and physiology on which he threw much light by his researches at this period were several connected with the generation, development, and structure of the Marsupialia and Monotrema, groups which always had great interest for him. It is a curious coincidence that his first paper communicated to the Royal Society (in 1832) "On the Mammary Glands of the Ornithorhynchus paradoxus" was one of a series which only terminated in almost the last which he offered to the same Society (in 1887), being a description of a newly excluded young of the same animal, published in the 'Proceedings,' vol. 42, p. 391.

On the completion of the 'Catalogue of the Physiological Series ' his curatorial duties led him to undertake the catalogues of the osteological collections of recent and extinct forms. This task necessitated minute studies of the modifications of the skeleton in all vertebrated animals, and researches into their dentition, the latter being finally embodied in his great work on 'Odontography' (1840-45), in which he brought a vast amount of light out of what was previously chaotic in our knowledge of the subject, and cleared the way for all future work upon it. Although recent advances of knowledge have shown that there are difficulties in accepting the whole of Owen's system of homologies and notation of the teeth of Mammals, it was an immense improvement upon anything of the kind which existed before, and a considerable part of it seems likely to remain a permanent addition to our means of describing these

organs. The close study of the bones and teeth of existing animals was of extreme importance to him in his long continued and laborious researches into fossil forms; and, following in the footsteps of Cuvier, he fully appreciated and deeply profited by the dependence of the study of the living in elucidating the dead, and vice versa. Perhaps the best example of this is to be seen in his elaborate memoir on the Mylodon, published in 1842, entitled 'Description of the Skeleton of an Extinct Gigantic Sloth (Mylodon robustus, Owen), with Observations on the Osteology, Natural Affinities, and Probable Habits of the Megatheroid Quadrupeds in General,' a masterpiece both of anatomical description and of reasoning and inference. A comparatively popular outcome of some of his work in this direction was the volume on 'British Fossil Mammals and Birds,' published in 1844-46, as a companion to the works of Yarrell, Bell, and others on the recent fauna of our island. He also wrote, assisted by Dr. S. P. Woodward, the article "Paleontology" for the Encyclopædia Britannica,' which, when afterwards published in a separate form, reached a second edition in 1861.

To this first period of his life belong the courses of Hunterian Lectures, given annually at the College of Surgeons, each year on a fresh subject, and each year the means of bringing before the world new and original discoveries which attracted, even fascinated, large audiences, and did much to foster an interest in the science among cultivated people of various classes and professions. They also added greatly to the scientific renown of the College in which they were given. To this period also belong the development and popularisation of those transcendental views of anatomy-the conception of creation according to types, and the construction of the Vertebrate archetype-views which had great attractions and even uses in their day, and which were accepted by many, at all events as working hypotheses around which facts could be marshalled, and out of which grew a methodical system of anatomical terminology, much of which has survived to the present time. The recognition of homology and its distinction from analogy, which was so strongly insisted on by Owen, marked a distinct advance in philosophical anatomy. These generalisations, first announced in lectures at the College of Surgeons, were afterwards embodied in two works: The Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton' (1848) and The Nature of Limbs' (1849).

The contributions which Owen made to our knowledge of the structure of Invertebrate animals nearly all belong to the earlier period of his career, one of the most important being his admirable and exhaustive memoir on the Pearly Nautilus founded on the dissection of a specimen of this, at that time exceedingly rare, animal, sent to him in spirit by his friend Dr. George Bennett, of Sydney. This