College of Surgeons was gradually becoming assured. He had begun as
assistant-curator at £120 a year, but with no prospects, as the place of
curator was expected to be given to Mr Clift’s son on his father’s
retirement. But in 1832 the younger Clift died suddenly from the effects
of an accident, and Owen remained as sole assistant at £200. In July
1833 his salary was raised to £300, and in 1835 he was enabled to marry
Caroline Clift, Mr Clift’s only daughter. From this time until 1852,
when the Queen gave him the delightful cottage at Sheen which he lived
in till his death, he had apartments within the building of the College
of Surgeons. They were small, and inconvenient in many ways. Owen was in
the habit of turning his study into a dissecting-room, and his wife’s
diary contains many amusing references to the pervading odours caused by
the examination of a rhinoceros or an elephant, or to such disturbances
as the following: ‘Great trampling and rushing upstairs past our bedroom
door. Asked Richard if the men were dancing the polka on the stairs. He
said, “No; what you hear is the body being carried upstairs. They are
dissecting for fellowship to-day!”’ But, on the other hand, the
proximity to the library and the museum, which he could enter at any
hour of the night or day, must have greatly helped one who worked so
incessantly. Ultimately, in 1842, Owen became sole curator, with Mr
Quekett as his assistant. This was, no doubt, a dignified position, but
it had its drawbacks. Owen’s golden time at the college was the period
between 1827 and 1842, when the business details were taken off his
hands by the painstaking and methodical Clift. After 1842 he was held
responsible, as curators usually are, for much that he regarded as
irksome routine. This he performed in a perfunctory fashion that did not
please the Council, and difficulties arose between that body and their
distinguished servant which time only rendered more acute. It may be
that the Council were not sufficiently sensible of the honour reflected
upon the college by possessing ‘the first anatomist of the age’; and
Owen, on his side, may have been too fond of doing work which brought
‘grist to the mill,’ and applause, and troops of friends, without being
directly connected with the college. However this may have been, it is
beyond dispute that Owen’s removal, in 1856, to the British Museum, was
a fortunate solution of a difficulty which otherwise would probably have
ended in an explosion.
It has been already mentioned that when the Hunterian Museum was
entrusted to the care of the College of Surgeons it had been stipulated
that its contents should be illustrated by an annual course of
twenty-four lectures. Up to 1836 this course had been divided between
the professors of anatomy and surgery; but in that year Owen was
appointed first Hunterian Professor of Comparative Anatomy and
Physiology. To the last days of his life he constantly referred to the
pleasure which this appointment gave him when first conferred upon him;
nor did this feeling wear off as time went on. He gave his lectures
regularly, with the same keen interest and thoroughness of preparation,
down to 1855. At first he confined himself strictly to his prescribed
subject; but gradually he widened his field, and introduced whatever
views or subjects happened to be interesting him. Most of the lectures
were worked up into books afterwards. He was an admirable lecturer—in
fact, he was better as a lecturer than as a writer; for it must be
confessed that his scientific style is often pedantic and cramped, and
he seems to use words rather for the sake of concealing his thoughts
than of imparting them. It is interesting to learn what pains he took
with his early lectures—how he rehearsed them to his wife, or to a
friend, till he got used to the work, and could estimate exactly how
much would fill the allotted hour. We cannot refrain from quoting Mrs
Owen’s account of the first lecture:
‘So busy all the morning; had hardly time to be nervous, luckily for me.
R. robed in the drawing-room, and took some egg and wine before going
into the theatre. He then went in and left me. At five o’clock a great
noise of clapping made me jump, for I timed the lecture to last a
quarter of an hour longer; but R., it seems, cut it short rather than
tire Sir Astley Cooper too much. All went off as well as even I could
wish. The theatre crammed, and there were many who could not get places.
R. was more collected than he or I ever supposed, and gave this awful
first lecture almost to his own satisfaction! We sat down a large party
to dinner. Mr Langshaw and R. afterwards played two of Corelli’s
sonatas’ (i. 109).
These lectures, more than anything that he wrote, made Owen famous, and
procured for him a passport into society. To understand this, which
appears almost a phenomenon at the present day, it must be remembered
that the lecture-mania had not become one of the common diseases of
humanity in 1836, and that it was still considered proper for great
people to play the part of Mecenas to those who were distinguished in
science or in letters. Hence, when the news spread abroad that a young
and hitherto unknown lecturer was discoursing eloquently on a new
subject in a building which few had heard of and none had seen,
curiosity carried fashion into Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and certain dukes
and earls, who cultivated a taste for natural history _dans leur moments
perdus_, set the example of sitting at the feet of the new Gamaliel;
more serious persons followed, and by-and-by a Hallam, a Carlyle, and a
Wilberforce might be seen there side by side with the lights of medicine
and surgery.
To most men the work which these lectures, together with the catalogue,
entailed, would have been sufficient. But Owen loved diversity of
occupations; and one of his fortunate accidents presently threw an
attractive paleontological subject in his way. It happened in this wise.
Readers of the _Life of Charles Darwin_ will remember his
disappointment, on his return home from the now classic voyage of the
_Beagle_, to find that zoologists cared but little for his collections;
that, in fact, Lyell and Owen were the only two who wished to possess
any of his specimens. The latter, who had been introduced to him by the
former, was not slow to grasp the scientific value of the extinct
animals whose bones Darwin had dug with his own hands out of the
fluviatile deposits of South America. He began with a huge skull—‘the
head of an animal equalling in size the hippopotamus’—and described it
before the Geological Society, in 1837, under the name of _Toxodon
platensis_. Further, as Mr Huxley points out:
‘It is worthy of notice, that in the title of this memoir there follow,
after the name of the species, the words “referable by its dentition to
the Rodentia, but with affinities to the Pachydermata and the
herbivorous Cetacea,” indicating the importance in the mind of the
writer of the fact that, like Cuvier’s _Anoplotherium_ and
_Paleotherium_, _Toxodon_ occupied a position between groups which, in
existing Nature, are now widely separated’ (ii. 308).
The same writer bids us remark that this ‘maiden essay in paleontology
possesses great interest’ from another point of view, for ‘it is with
reference to Owen’s report on _Toxodon_ that Darwin remarks in his
_Journal_: “How wonderfully are the different orders, at the present
time so well separated, blended together in different points in the
structure of _Toxodon_.”’ Soon afterwards Owen described the rest of
Darwin’s fossil specimens in the geological part of _The Zoology of the
‘Beagle’ Voyage_.
Two years later, in 1839, a second and still more sensational
_trouvaille_ came into his hands. A fragment of bone was offered for
sale to the College of Surgeons, with the statement that it had been
obtained in New Zealand from a native, who said that it was the bone of
a great extinct eagle. Out of this fragment there ultimately grew that
phalanx of huge extinct birds to which Owen gave the name of _Dinornis_
(bird of wonder), on which he occupied himself till his death. His
recognition of the true origin of this fragment was, no doubt, a
wonderful instance of his osteological sagacity; but it is a
misrepresentation of fact to say that he evolved the whole of an extinct
bird out of a fragment of bone six inches long. What he did do, and how
he did it, shall be told in his own words:
‘As soon as I was at leisure I took the bone to the skeleton of the ox,
expecting to verify my first surmise [that it was a marrow-bone, like
those brought to table wrapped in a napkin]; but, with some resemblance
to the shaft of the thigh-bone, there were precluding differences. From
the ox’s humerus, which also affords the tavern delicacy, the
discrepancy of shape was more marked. Still, led by the thickness of the
wall of the marrow-cavity, I proceeded to compare the bone with
similar-sized portions of the skeletons of the various quadrupeds which
might have been introduced and have left their remains in New Zealand;
but it was clearly unconformable with any such portions.
‘In the course of these comparisons I noted certain obscure superficial
markings on the bone, which recalled to mind similar ones which I had
observed on the surface of the long bones in some large birds. Thereupon
I proceeded with it to the skeleton of the ostrich. The bone tallied in
point of size with the shaft of the thigh-bone in that bird, but was
markedly different in shape. There were, however, the same superficial
reticulate impressions on the ostrich’s femur which had caught my
attention in the exhaustive comparison previously made with the
mammalian bones.
‘In short, stimulated to more minute and extended examinations, I
arrived at the conviction that the specimen had come from a bird, that
it was the shaft of a thigh-bone, and that it must have formed part of
the skeleton of a bird as large as, if not larger than, the full-sized
male ostrich, with this more striking difference, that whereas the femur
of the ostrich, like that of the rhea and eagle, is pneumatic, or
contains air, the present huge bird’s bone had been filled with marrow,
like that of a beast[121].’
The suggestion was received with sceptical astonishment, and the paper
in which Owen announced it to the Zoological Society (November 12, 1839)
narrowly escaped exclusion from the _Transactions_ of that body on the
ground of its improbability. But confirmation was not slow to arrive,
though in a direction that was not then expected. The bone was not
fossilized; it was therefore naturally concluded that there existed
somewhere in New Zealand—then but partially explored—a race of birds of
gigantic stature and struthious affinities. We have no space to tell the
story of the extinction of the moa, as the natives call it—surely the
most weird and curious of all ‘the fairy-tales of science’; but to Owen
certainly belongs the credit of having been the first to point the way
to the great discovery. No work of his created so much excitement.
Society, headed by Prince Albert, hurried to inspect the huge remains,
of which a large series soon reached this country, and to be introduced
to the fortunate necromancer, at whose bidding a phantom procession of
strange creatures had suddenly stepped out of the past into the present.
From this time forward Owen continued to pay as much attention to
extinct as to recent animals, as his numerous publications testify. The
work fascinated and excited him.
‘There was no hunt,’ he declared, ‘so exciting, so full of interest, and
so satisfactory when events prove one to have been on the right scent,
as that of a huge beast which no eye will ever see alive, and which,
perhaps, no mortal eye ever did behold. Such a chase is not ended in a
day, in a week, nor in a season. One’s interest is revived and roused
year by year as bit by bit of the petrified portions of the skeleton
comes to hand. Thirty such years elapsed before I was able to outline a
restoration of _Diprotodon australis_’ [the gigantic extinct kangaroo].
In 1841 appeared his ‘_Description of the Skeleton of an Extinct
Gigantic Sloth (Mylodon robustus)_, 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,’ as Sir W. Flower calls it. He demonstrated its
affinities with the sloths on osteological and dental grounds, and then
reasoned out its habits from its configuration; showing that a creature
so vast could not have ascended trees, but must have pulled them down to
browse on them at its leisure. Then came the work on British Fossil
Mammals and Birds, with a long series of memoirs, growing in importance
as evidences of new forms, discovered in all parts of the world, came
pouring in, as though his own reputation had attracted them; on the
Triassic Labyrinthodonts of Central England; on the extinct fauna of
South Africa and Australia; on the Reptiles of the Wealden and other
formations in England, published by the Paleontographical Society, of
which he was one of the first and most ardent supporters; on the
_Archæopteryx_ from Solenhofen; on the Great Auk; and on the Dodo, one
of the representations of which, in an old Dutch picture, he had the
good fortune to discover. It is, indeed, as Mr Huxley remarks, ‘a
splendid record: enough, and more than enough, to justify the high place
in the scientific world which Owen so long occupied.’
These researches did not pass unrewarded. In 1838 the Geological Society
gave to Owen the Wollaston Gold Medal for his work on Darwin’s
collections, and it happened, by a fortunate coincidence, that Whewell,
his fellow-townsman and school-fellow, occupied the chair on the
occasion. In subsequent years he was twice invited to be president of
that society; but on both occasions he was compelled to decline. Next,
in 1841, Sir Robert Peel offered him a pension of £200 from the Civil
List, protesting in a very gracious letter that he knew nothing about
his political opinions, but merely wished ‘to encourage that devotion to
science for which you are so eminently distinguished.’ This offer, which
was gratefully accepted, laid the foundation of an intercourse between
Owen and Sir Robert which ripened by-and-by into something like
friendship. Dinners in London were succeeded by visits to Drayton, at
one of which Owen amused the company with a microscope which he had
brought with him (of course quite accidentally); and, finally, his
portrait was painted for the gallery there, as a pendant to that of
Cuvier. In 1845 Owen refused knighthood.
At this point in Owen’s career it will be convenient to pause for a
moment and describe very briefly what manner of man it was that was
rapidly becoming a leading figure in London society. We remember him
from an earlier date than we care to mention, but, as we have no turn
for portrait-painting, we gladly accept Sir W. Flower’s lifelike sketch:
‘Owen was tall and ungainly in figure, with massive head, lofty
forehead, curiously round, prominent, and expressive eyes, high
cheek-bones, large mouth, and projecting chin, long, lank, dark hair,
and, during the greater part of his life, smooth-shaven face and very
florid complexion.’
His manners were distinguished for ceremonious courtesy, coupled with
the formal exactness of a punctilious Frenchman. His bows were not
easily forgotten. His enemies said, and his friends could not deny, that
they varied with the rank of the person to whom he was presented. In
fact Owen might have said, with Sir Pertinax Macsycophant, ‘I naver in
my life could stond straight i’ th’ presence of a great mon; but awways
boowed, and boowed, and boowed, as it were by instinct.’
Next to what he called ‘my dear comparative anatomy,’ Owen loved music,
and was at one time no mean performer, both vocally and instrumentally.
Music was his constant recreation in an evening, and he has even been
known to take his violoncello out with him to parties. He was a frequent
attendant at concerts and operas, and when Weber’s _Oberon_ was first
performed in London he went to hear it thirty nights in succession. The
stage also had attractions for him, and he and his wife had many friends
in the dramatic profession. Macready in _Henry the Fifth_, Charles Kean
in _Louis XI._ and _Richard III._, and many minor stars, gave him great
pleasure; and it was on the stage of Drury Lane Theatre, while joining
the actors in singing the National Anthem on the occasion of the Queen’s
first state visit, that he met Charles Dickens, who afterwards became
his intimate friend. ‘London,’ he once said, ‘is the place for
interchange of thought’; and it was a relief to him to lay his habitual
pursuits aside for a few hours, and exchange ideas with men whose lives
lay in lines wholly different from his own. He found dining-out a
relaxation—the hours were earlier in those days—and gradually, as his
social gifts were discovered, he was much in request. No man could tell
a story better, and his general conversation was brilliant and original.
He had the happy art of dilating on his own pursuits without being
either a pedant or a bore. Consequently he was a member of many
societies who, ‘greatly daring, dined,’ as, for instance, the Abernethy
Club, the Literary Society, and The Club, founded by Dr Johnson, an
exclusive society limited to forty members, in which he occupied the
place once filled by Oliver Goldsmith. He also promoted the Royal
Literary Fund and the Actors Benevolent Fund—where his after-dinner
eloquence was much appreciated. He was a good chess-player, and was
often matched, successfully, with some of the first players of the day,
as Landseer, Staunton, and the Duke of Brunswick. His acquaintance with
literature was wider than might have been expected from his absorbing
occupations in other directions, and his retentive memory enabled him to
quote pages of Milton, Shakespeare, and other standard writers. He was
also an ardent novel-reader. Mrs Owen kept him well supplied with the
novels of the day; and he sat up half the night over _Eugene Aram_, the
serial stories of Dickens, _Vanity Fair_, _Shirley_, and _The Mill on
the Floss_, which we are glad to find he preferred to all the rest of
George Eliot’s stories. Apart from his social proclivities, he managed
to get acquainted with most of the celebrated people of the day. They
either came to see him and the museum he directed, or they asked him to
call on them. Among those whom he met in this way we may mention Mrs
Fry, Miss Edgeworth, Turner, Samuel Warren, Emerson, Guizot, the younger
Dumas, Fanny Kemble, Tennyson, Macaulay, and Carlyle, who described him
as ‘the man with the glittering eyes,’ and decided that he was ‘neither
a fool nor a humbug.’ In his own especial line of science he was
intimate with Lord Enniskillen, Sir Philip Egerton, Prince Lucien
Bonaparte, Sedgwick, Murchison, Lyell; and subsequently took a keen
interest in the researches of Livingstone, whom he helped with the first
record of his African work. ‘Poor Livingstone!’ he says; ‘he does not
know what it is to write a book.’ When Owen could find time for a
holiday, which was but seldom, he enjoyed fishing and grouse-shooting;
but his delight in Nature was so keen that probably sport was what he
least valued in these excursions.
It was natural that, as Owen’s reputation grew, he should be involved in
some of the schemes for improving the condition of the people which from
time to time engaged the attention of Government. In 1843 he served on a
commission of inquiry into the health of towns, and exercised himself
over sewers, slaughter-houses, and such-like abominations. In 1846 he
was on the Metropolitan Sewers Commission, which grew out of the former,
and he did much good work in hunting up evidence about the spread of
cholera and typhus from imperfect drainage. In the course of this he
incurred considerable unpopularity, and was contemptuously nick-named
‘Jack of all Trades.’ The work became so heavy and absorbing that he
thought of resigning; but when Lord Morpeth urged him to remain, on the
ground that they could ill spare his ‘enlightened philanthropy,’ he not
only withdrew his resignation, but consented to serve on a commission to
consider the state of Smithfield Market and the meat supply of London
(1849), a subject on which he held very decided opinions. Probably his
zoological qualifications, coupled with his knowledge of what had been
effected on the Continent in the way of establishing extramural
slaughter-houses, had much to do with abolishing the market. He was also
on the Preliminary Committee of Organization for the Great Exhibition of
1851, and chairman of the jury on raw materials, alimentary substances,
&c. Similar services were performed by him for the exhibition held at
Paris in 1855.
He was also a mark for many of those questions, serious and absurd
alike, which are presented for solution to men of science. A firm of
undertakers asked him how much they ought to charge for embalming Mr
Beckford; a grave Oriental from the Turkish Embassy submitted to his
examination the bowl of a tobacco-pipe which he believed to have been
made out of the beak of a Phœnix; his opinion was sought by the Home
Office on the window-tax, and by Charles Dickens on the publicity of
executions; his microscopical skill was brought to bear on the so-called
contemporary annotations of Shakespeare; and he demolished one of the
many sea-serpents in which a marvel-loving public from time to time
believes. He showed very conclusively that it was probably a large seal.
His letter to the _Times_ on the subject excited a good deal of
attention, and Prince Albert dubbed him ‘the serpent-killer.’ He was
also to a certain extent responsible for the models of extinct animals
in the gardens of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, and was rewarded for
his trouble by a dinner in the spacious carcase of the Iguanodon.
In 1856—it is said, through the influence of Lord Macaulay—Owen was
appointed Superintendent of the Department of Natural History at the
British Museum, with a salary of £800 a year. The new officer was to
stand towards the collections of natural history in the same relation
that the librarian did towards the books and antiquities, and to be
directly responsible, as he was, to the trustees. Great advantages were
expected to result from this new departure, and Owen was warmly
congratulated. Professor Sedgwick wrote:
‘I trust that your move to the British Museum is for your happiness. If
God spare your health, it will be a grand move for the benefit of
British science. An _Imperator_ was sadly wanted in that vast
establishment’ (ii. 19).
With Lord Macaulay, anxiety for Owen himself had been paramount:
‘I am extremely desirous that something should be done for Owen. I
hardly know him to speak to. His pursuits are not mine; but his fame is
spread over Europe. He is an honour to our country, and it is painful to
me to think that a man of his merit should be approaching old age amidst
anxieties and distresses. He told me that eight hundred a year, without
a house in the Museum, would be opulence to him’ (ii. 15).
A little foresight might have saved much disappointment. The subordinate
officers, whom Owen was expected to influence, owed no allegiance to
him, and resented his intrusion; they had long been practically
independent within their own departments, and desired to remain so. Such
a situation would have been difficult even for a born leader of men; but
for Owen, whose gifts did not lie in that direction, it meant either
resignation or acceptance of the inevitable. He chose the latter, and,
dropping the sword of a despot, assumed the peaceful mantle of a
constitutional sovereign. His reputation did good service to the
collections in the way of attracting specimens of all kinds from all
parts of the world; and he exerted himself with exemplary diligence to
obtain special _desiderata_; but otherwise his duties as administrator
soon became little more than nominal. There was, however, one subject
connected with the Museum which had long engaged his attention, and
which he had the pleasure to see settled before he died, though not
entirely on the lines he had at first laid down.