was too small for the various collections, and two years before Owen’s
arrival Dr Gray, keeper of zoology, had made a definite request for
additional accommodation. The trustees, after much consideration, agreed
to a small, but wholly inadequate, extension of one of the galleries.
Owen did not act hastily, but, having thoroughly mastered the subject,
addressed a report to the trustees in 1859, in which he showed that,
having regard to the congestion of the existing galleries, the quantity
of specimens stored out of sight, and the probable rate of increase, a
space of ten acres ought to be acquired at once. This report was
accompanied by a plan, drawn by himself, in which several special
features may be noticed. A central hall was to contain an epitome of
natural history—specimens selected to show the type-characters of the
principal groups—called in subsequent editions of the plan the
Index-Museum; adjoining this hall there was to be a lecture-theatre;
zoology was to include physical ethnology, for which a gallery measuring
150 feet by 50 feet was to be provided; the Cetacea, stuffed specimens
and skeletons, were to have a long gallery to themselves; and lastly,
paleontology was no longer to be separated from zoology, but the gallery
containing the one was to be readily entered from the gallery containing
the other. A plan so novel, so enlightened, so truly imperial as this,
was far too much in advance of the age to meet with anything except
opposition and ridicule. When it was debated in the House of Commons, Mr
Gregory, M.P. for Galway, got it referred to a Select Committee,
regretting, in reference to its author, ‘that a man whose name stood so
high should connect himself with so foolish, crazy, and extravagant a
scheme.’ Owen’s first idea had been to purchase the land required at
Bloomsbury; but on this point he had no very decided personal opinion,
and, yielding to that of the majority of men of science, he advocated by
lecture, by conversation, and in print, the removal of the collections
of natural history to a new and distant site. For this scheme he
fortunately secured the powerful advocacy of Mr Gladstone, then
Chancellor of the Exchequer, who moved (May 12, 1862) for leave to bring
in a Bill to effect it. These excellent intentions were thwarted by Mr
Disraeli, who, knowing no more about science than he did about
primroses, saw only a chance of obstructing a political opponent; and
once more the scheme was adjourned. The adjournment, however, was of
short duration, for in 1863 Parliament voted the purchase of five acres
at South Kensington, which Owen presently persuaded the Government to
increase to eight; but further delays, extending over nearly twenty
years, ensued, and when Owen resigned in 1883 the collections were not
yet completely arranged in their new home.
The Museum as completed is widely different from that which Owen
originally prescribed. The gallery of ethnology is gone; the Cetacea are
relegated, as at Bloomsbury in former days, to a cellar; there is no
lecture-theatre; and, in fact, the index-museum is almost the only
special feature which has survived, but even this was not arranged by
himself. On one vital question of arrangement, moreover, Owen allowed
his own views to be overruled. So early as 1842 he had reported to the
Council of the College of Surgeons on the expediency of combining the
fossil and recent osteological specimens, pointing out that
‘the peculiarities of the extinct mastodon, for example, cannot be
understood without a comparison with the analogous parts of the elephant
and tapir; nor those of the ichthyosaurus without reference to the
skeletons of crocodiles and fishes. The proper position of such
specimens in the Museum is, therefore, between those series of skeletons
of which they present transitional or intermediate structures.’
An arrangement of the recent and fossil collections in accordance with
these most reasonable and philosophical views appears in all the
versions of the plan until the last; now it has entirely disappeared,
and the two collections are disposed in opposite wings of the building
widely severed from each other. Owen had no special turn for
organization, and he was probably in a minority of one against his
colleagues on this point. Besides this, his fighting days were over, and
he preferred peace to an ideal arrangement of which his contemporaries
could not see the advantages.
Owen turned his enforced leisure at the British Museum to good account,
and proceeded, with renewed activity, to occupy himself in various
directions. In 1857 he gave lectures on paleontology at the Royal School
of Mines, and his first course seems to have evoked the enthusiasm of
his earlier days. Said Sir Roderick Murchison:
‘I never heard so thoroughly eloquent a lecture as that of yesterday....
It is the first time I have had the pleasure of seeing our British
Cuvier in his true place, and not the less delighted to listen to his
fervid and convincing defence of the principle laid down by his great
precursor. Everyone was charmed, and he will have done more (as I felt
convinced) to render our institution favourably known than by any other
possible method’ (ii. 61).
Soon afterwards he was appointed (1859-61) Fullerian Professor of
Physiology at the Royal Institution. Here again he chose ‘Fossil
Mammals’ as his subject. In later years he gave frequent lectures on
this and kindred subjects in the larger provincial towns. Nor must we
omit the lectures to the Royal children at Buckingham Palace, which he
delivered at the request of Prince Albert in 1860. These lectures, which
were much appreciated by those for whom they were intended, laid the
foundations of a close friendship between Owen and the Royal Family.
It must not, however, be supposed that these occupations diverted him
from osteology. It was during this period that he wrote many of the
paleontological memoirs to which we have already alluded. He continued
to publish paper after paper on _Dinornis_ as fresh material
accumulated; and he composed, among others, his monograph on the Aye-Aye
(1863), which perhaps excited as much attention as that on the Nautilus
thirty years before.
Between 1866 and 1868 he published his elaborate treatise _On the
Anatomy of Vertebrates_, obviously intended to be the standard work on
the subject for all time. But alas for the fallacies of hope! It is an
immense store-house of information, founded in the main upon his own
observations and dissections; and from no similar work will advanced
students derive so much assistance. But, unfortunately, no revision of
his own papers was attempted; the novel classification employed has
never been accepted by any school of zoologists; and the only result of
the proposed division of the Mammalia into four sub-classes, according
to their cerebral characteristics, was a controversy from which Owen
emerged with his reputation for scientific accuracy seriously impaired,
if not irretrievably ruined. He had stated, not merely in the work of
which we are speaking, but in others—as, for instance, in the Rede
Lecture delivered at Cambridge in 1859—that certain divisions of the
human brain were absent in the apes. It was proved over and over again,
in public and private, that this assertion was contrary to fact, and
contrary to his own authorities; but he could never be persuaded to
retract, or even to modify, his statements.
At the end of the third volume of the _Anatomy_ are some ‘General
Conclusions,’ which contain, so far as human intelligence can penetrate
the meaning of Owen’s ‘dark speech,’ his final views on the origin of
species. We have already shown that his mind was first turned to this
momentous question during his visit to Paris in 1831, and that
subsequently, during his work on the Physiological and Osteological
Catalogues of the Museum of the College of Surgeons, it was continually
in his thoughts. During this period he read, and was profoundly
influenced by, Oken’s _Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie_, a translation of
which was published by the Ray Society, in 1847, at his instance. In his
_Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton_ (1848) he says:
‘The subject of the following essay has occupied a portion of my
attention from the period when, after having made a certain progress in
comparative anatomy, the evidence of a greater conformity to type,
especially in the bones of the head of the vertebrate animals, than the
immortal Cuvier had been willing to admit, began to enforce a
reconsideration of his conclusions, to which I had previously yielded
implicit assent.’
Out of the study here indicated there grew a revision of the vertebrate
skeleton, in which the homologues (_i.e._ the same organs in different
animals, under every variety of form and function) were recognized, and
a new system of osteological nomenclature was proposed. In this Owen did
excellent work, which has been generally accepted. But in his anxiety to
recognize and account for ‘the one in the many,’ he adopted Oken’s idea
of the skeleton being resolvable into a succession of vertebræ, and
evolved the idea of an archetype. It is almost inconceivable that the
clear-headed and sagacious interpreter, whose sober conclusions we have
indicated through a long series of zoological and paleontological
memoirs, should have ever adopted these transcendental speculations. But
there was evidently a metaphysical side to his mind, and he took a keen,
almost a puerile, delight in this child of his fancy. He even had a seal
engraved with a symbolical representation of it. To show that we are not
exaggerating we will quote his own account of his views when sending the
seal to his sister:
‘It represents the archetype, or primal pattern—what Plato would have
called the “Divine Idea”—on which the osseous frame of all vertebrate
animals has been constructed. The motto is “The One in the Manifold,”
expressive of the unity of plan which may be traced through all the
modifications of the pattern, by which it is adapted to the varied
habits and modes of life of fishes, reptiles, birds, beasts, and human
kind. Many have been the attempts to discover the vertebrate archetype,
and it seems now generally felt that it has been found’ (i. 388).
But, assuming Owen to have really discovered the one, he was as far off
as ever from the origin of the many. And on this subject he never did
reach any definite conclusion. He admits, it is true, a theory which
sounds very like evolution:
‘Thus, at the acquisition of facts adequate to test the moot question of
links between past and present species, as at the close of that other
series of researches proving the skeleton of all Vertebrates, and even
of Man, to be the harmonized sum of a series of essentially similar
segments, I have been led to recognize species as exemplifying the
continuous operation of natural law, or secondary cause; and that, not
only successively, but progressively; from the first embodiment of the
Vertebrate idea under its old Ichthyic vestment until it became arrayed
in the glorious garb of the human form[122].’
In this quotation he is in the main stating the views he held in 1849,
for the latter portion of it is from his essay _On the Nature of Limbs_,
published in that year. But the nature of the secondary cause which
produced species cannot be concluded from his works. He fiercely
contested Darwin’s theory of natural selection, both in conversation and
in periodicals. To the last he clung to a notion of a ‘vital property,’
which is thus described in the _Anatomy_ (iii. 807):
‘So, being unable to accept the volitional hypothesis, or that of
impulse from within, or the selective force exerted by outward
circumstances, I deem an innate tendency to deviate from parental type,
operating through periods of adequate duration, to be the most probable
nature, or way of operation, of the secondary law, whereby species have
been derived one from the other.’
In 1883 Owen resigned his office at the British Museum and retired into
private life. His remaining years were passed at Sheen in a tranquil and
apparently happy old age. In 1884 he was gazetted a K.C.B., and, on Mr
Gladstone’s initiative, his pension was augmented by £100 a year. But,
though it pleased him to be always pleading poverty, he was really a
comparatively wealthy man, and when he died left £30,000 behind him. His
wife died in 1873, and his only son in 1886; but a solitude which might
have been painful was enlivened by the presence of his son’s widow and
her seven children. Owen delighted in the country. He had a genuine love
for outdoor natural history, and ‘the sight of the deer and other
animals in the park, the birds and insects in the garden, the trees,
flowers, and varying aspects of the sky, filled him with enthusiastic
admiration.’ He died, literally of old age, on Sunday, 18 January, 1892.
It is much to be regretted that one who worked at his own subjects with
such untiring zeal should have left behind him almost nothing to
perpetuate his name with the great mass of the people. Mr Huxley remarks
that, ‘whether we consider the quantity or the quality of the work done,
or the wide range of his labours, I doubt if, in the long annals of
anatomy, more is to be placed to the credit of any single worker’ (ii.
306); but he presently adds this caution: ‘Obvious as are the merits of
Owen’s anatomical work to every expert, it is necessary to be an expert
to discern them’ (ii. 332). He gave popular lectures, but they were not
printed[123]; he wrote what he intended to be a work for all time, but
it has faded out of recollection, and the whole theory of the archetype
is now as dead as his own Dinornis. Nor was he at pains to surround
himself with a circle of pupils who might have handed down the teaching
of the Master to another generation, as Cuvier’s teaching was handed
down by his pupils. It was one of Owen’s defects that he was repellent
to younger men. In a word, he was secretive, impatient of interference,
and preferred to be _aut Cæsar aut nullus_. Credit was to him worth
nothing if it was to be divided. Again, brilliant as were his talents
and assured as was his position, he could not recognize the truth that
men may sometimes err, and that the greatest gain rather than lose by
admitting it. During the whole of his long life we believe that he never
owned to a mistake. Not only was what he said law, but what others
ventured to say—especially if it ‘came between the wind and his
nobility’—was to be brushed aside as of no moment. We believe that this
feeling on his part explains his refusal to accept the Darwinian theory.
As we have shown, he went half way with it, and then dropped it, because
it had not been hammered on his own anvil. This unfortunate antagonism
to other workers, coupled with his readiness to enter into controversy,
and the acrimony and dexterity with which he handled his adversaries,
naturally discouraged those who would otherwise have been only too happy
to sit at the feet of the Nestor of English zoology; and during the last
thirty years of his life he became gradually more and more isolated.
Moreover, there was, or there was thought to be, a certain want of
sincerity about him which no amount of external courtesy could wholly
conceal. In a word, he was compact of strange contradictions. He had
many noble qualities; and yet he could not truly be called great, for
they were warped and overshadowed by many moral perversities. Had he
lived in the previous century his portrait might have been sketched by
Pope:
‘But were there one whose fires
True genius kindles and fair fame inspires;
Blest with each talent and each art to please,
And born to write, converse, and live with ease;
Should such a man, too fond to rule alone,
Bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne,
View him with scornful yet with jealous eyes,
And hate for arts that caused himself to rise;
* * * * * * *
Like _Cato_, give his little senate laws,
And sit attentive to his own applause;
While wits and templars every sentence raise,
And wonder with a foolish face of praise—
Who but must laugh, if such a man there be?
Who would not weep, if _Atticus_ were he!’
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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