comparative anatomy and zoology are the following: “On the Affinities of
the Brain of the Orang-Utan,” _Nat. Hist. Review_, 1861; “On the
Aquiferous and Oviductal System in the Lamellibranchiate Molluscs” (with
Mr. C. Robertson), _Phil. Trans._, 1862; “On the Placental Structures of
the Tenrec (_Centetes ecaudatus_), and those of certain other Mammals,
with Remarks on the Value of the Placental System of Classification,”
_Trans. Zool. Soc._ 1866; “On the Domestic Cats of Ancient and Modern
Times,” _Journal of Anatomy_, 1868; “On the Homologies of certain
Muscles connected with the Shoulder-joint,” _Trans. Linn. Soc._ 1870;
“On the Development of the Enamel in the Teeth of Mammals,” _Quart.
Journ. Micros. Soc._ 1872; and “On the Domestic Pig in Prehistoric
Times,” _Trans. Linn. Soc._ 1877.
Latterly he did much admirable work in anthropology, for which he was
excellently qualified, being one of the few men who possessed the
culture of the antiquarian, historian, and philologist on the one hand,
and of the anatomist and zoologist on the other, and could make these
different branches of knowledge converge upon the complex problem of
man’s early history. The chief results of his work of this nature are
contained in his contributions to Greenwell’s _British Barrows_ (1877),
a book containing a fund of solid information relating to the early
inhabitants of this island. His last publication, and one which is, on
the whole, the most characteristic, as exhibiting his vast range of
knowledge on many different subjects, was a lecture delivered in 1879
at the Royal Geographical Society, on “The Modifications of the External
Aspects of Organic Nature produced by Man’s Interference.”
That Dr. Rolleston has not left more original scientific work behind him
is easily accounted for by the circumstances under which he lived at
Oxford. The multifarious nature of the subjects with which the chair was
overweighted; the perpetual discussions in which, during the whole term
of his office, he was engaged, consequent upon the transitional
condition of education, both at Oxford and elsewhere; the immense amount
of business thrust upon him, or voluntarily undertaken by him, of the
kind which always accumulates round the few men who are at the same time
capable and unselfish, such as questions pertaining to the local and
especially to the sanitary affairs of the town in which he lived, or
questions connected with the reform of the medical profession, arising
both within and outside the Medical Council, which latter business
constantly brought him to meetings in London; his own wide grasp of
interest in social subjects, his deep feeling of the responsibilities of
citizenship, and a sense of the duties of social hospitality, which made
his house always open to scientific visitors to Oxford,--all these
rendered impossible to him that intense concentration which is requisite
for carrying out any continuous line of research.
He was often blamed for undertaking so much and such divers kinds of
labour, so distracting to his scientific pursuits; but being by
constitution a man who could never see a wrong without feeling a burning
desire to set it right, who could never “pass by on the other side” when
he felt that it was in his power to help, nothing but actual physical
impossibility would restrain him. For several years past, when feeling
that his health and strength did not respond to the strain he put upon
them, he resorted to every hygienic measure suggested but one, and that
the one he most required--rest; but this he never would or could take.
During the last term he spent at Oxford, before his medical friends
positively forced him (though unfortunately too late) to give up his
occupations and seek change in a more genial climate, he was working at
the highest pressure, rising every morning at six o’clock, to get two
uninterrupted hours in which to write the revised edition of the _Forms
of Animal Life_, before the regular business of the day commenced.
It is impossible for those who had no personal knowledge of Rolleston to
realise what manner of man he was, and how great his loss will be to
those who remain behind him. No one can ever have passed an hour in his
company, or heard him speak at a public meeting, without feeling that he
was a man of most unusual power, of lofty sentiments, generous impulses,
marvellous energy, and wonderful command of language. In brilliant
repartee, aptness of quotation, and ever-ready illustration from poetry,
history, and the literature of many nations and many subjects, besides
those with which he was specially occupied, he had few equals. “In God’s
war slackness is infamy” might well have been his motto, for with
Rolleston there was no slackness in any cause which he believed to be
God’s war. He was impetuous, even vehement, in his advocacy of what
appeared to him true and right, and unsparing in denunciation of all
that was mean, base, and false. To those points in the faith of his
fathers which he believed to be essential he held reverently and
courageously, but on many questions, both social and political, he was a
reformer of the most advanced type. Often original in his views, always
outspoken in giving expression to them, he occasionally met with the
fate of those who do not swim with the stream, and was misunderstood;
but this was more than compensated for by the affection, admiration, and
enthusiasm with which he was regarded by those who were able to
appreciate the nobility of his character. The sentiment which guided his
life, and which he never lost an opportunity of impressing upon his
younger friends, was that contained in the beautiful lines of
Wordsworth--
We live by Admiration, Hope, and Love,
And even as these are well and wisely fixed,
In dignity of being we ascend.
When Huxley was spoken of in relation to himself, he at once expressed
the chivalrous and loyal feeling he bore towards worthy leaders in
science, by quoting the words in which Lancelot speaks of King Arthur--
In me there dwells
No greatness, save it be some far-off touch
Of greatness to know well I am not great:
There is the man.
The loss of the example afforded by such a nature, and of his elevating
influence on younger and weaker men, is to our mind a still greater
loss, both within and without the University in which he taught, than
the loss of what scientific work he might yet have performed.
Dr. Rolleston’s personal appearance corresponded with his character. Of
commanding height, broad-shouldered, with a head of unusual size,
indicating a volume of brain commensurate with his intellectual power,
clear penetrating blue eyes, and strongly-marked and expressive
features, in which refinement and vigour were singularly blended, in him
we saw just such a man as was described by the public orator at the late
Oxford Commemoration, in words with which we may conclude this notice:
“Virum excultissimi ingenii, integritatis incorruptissimæ, veritatis
amicum, et propugnatorem impavidum.”
XXII
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE OF SIR RICHARD OWEN[83]
Richard Owen was born at Lancaster on 20th July 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), was 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 18th August 1826.
His first published scientific works were in the direction of surgical
pathology, being on encysted calculus, 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
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 the 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 for aid 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, 9th
November 1830, and was continued with descriptions of dissections of the
beaver, suricate, acouchy, Thibet bear, gannet, crocodile, armadillo,
seal, kangaroo, tapir, toucan, flamingo, hyrax, horn-bill, 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 Owen
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 versâ_. 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 “Palæontology” 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 was illustrated by
carefully executed drawings by his own hand, and published in the year
1832, when he was only twenty-seven years of age. The Cephalopoda
continued to engage his attention, and the merits of a memoir on fossil
Belemnites from the Oxford Clay, published in the _Philosophical
Transactions_ in 1844, was the cause assigned for the award to him of
the Royal Medal in 1846. He contributed the article “Cephalopoda,” to
the _Cyclopædia of Anatomy and Physiology_ (1836), catalogued the
extinct Cephalopoda in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons
(1856), and wrote original papers on _Clavagella_ (1834), _Trichina
spiralis_ (1835), _Linguatula_ (1835), _Distoma_ (1835), _Spondylus_
(1838), _Euplectella_ (1841), _Terebratula_ (in the introduction to
Davidson’s classical _Monograph of the British Fossil Brachiopods_,
1853), and many other subjects, including the well-known essay on
“Parthenogenesis, or the Successive Production of Procreating
Individuals from a Single Ovum” (1849).
In 1843 his _Lectures on the Comparative Anatomy and Physiology of the
Invertebrate Animals_, in the form of notes taken by his pupil, Mr. W.
White Cooper, appeared as a separate work. Of this, a second expanded
and revised edition was published in 1855. By this time, as the Royal
Society’s _Catalogue of Scientific Papers_ shows, he had been the author
of as many as 250 separate scientific memoirs.
In 1856, when Owen had reached the zenith of his fame, and was
recognised throughout Europe as the first anatomist of the day, a change
came over his career. Difficulties with the governing body of the
College of Surgeons, arising from his impatience at being required to
perform what he considered the lower administrative duties of his
office, caused him readily to take advantage of an offer from the
Trustees of the British Museum to undertake a newly-created post, that
of Superintendent of the Natural History Departments of the Museum. It
was thought that hitherto these departments, being under the direct
control of a chief who had been invariably chosen from the literary side
of the establishment, and whose title in fact was that of “Principal
Librarian,” had not obtained their due share of attention in the general
and financial administration, and that if they were grouped together and
placed under a strong administrator, who should be able to exercise
influence in advocating their claims to consideration, and who should be
responsible for their internal working, their relative position in the
establishment would be improved. Owen was accordingly placed in this
position, and bade farewell to the College of Surgeons, its museum, and
its lectures. At the British Museum, however, he encountered the
difficulties which are nearly always experienced by an outsider suddenly
imported into the midst of an existing establishment without any very
well-defined position. The Principal Librarian, Sir A. Panizzi, was a
man of strong will and despotic character, and little disposed to share
any of his authority with another. The heads of the departments,
especially Dr. J. E. Gray, Keeper of Zoology, preferred to maintain the
independence to which they were accustomed within their own sphere of
action, and to have no intermediary between them and the Trustees,
except the Principal Librarian, who, though perhaps with little
sympathy, had also, from lack of special knowledge, but little power of
interference in detail. Hence Owen found himself in a situation the
duties of which were little more than nominal, probably for him the best
that could have been, as it gave his indomitable industry full play in
the directions for which his talents were best fitted, and with the
magnificent material in the collections of the Museum at his command, he
set to work with great vigour upon a renewed series of researches, the
results of which for many years taxed the resources of most of the
scientific societies of London to publish. It followed from the nature
of the materials that came most readily to his hand, and the smaller
facilities for dissection now available than those afforded by the
College of Surgeons, that his original work was henceforth mainly
confined to osteology, and chiefly to that of extinct animals. The rich
treasures of the palæontological department were explored, named, and
described, as were also the valuable additions which poured in from
various parts of the world, attracted in many cases by Owen’s great
reputation. The long series of papers on the gigantic extinct Birds of
New Zealand, begun in the year 1839, at the College of Surgeons, with
the receipt of the fragment of a femur, upon which the first evidence of
their existence was based, was now continued at intervals as fresh
materials arrived.[84] The Marsupials of Australia, the Edentates of
South America, the Triassic Reptiles from South Africa, the
_Archæopteryx_ from Solenhofen, the Mesozoic Mammals from the Purbeck,
the Aborigines of the Andaman Islands, the Cave remains, human and
otherwise, of the South of France, the Cetacea of the Suffolk crag, the
gorilla and other Anthropoid apes, the dodo, great auk, and _Chiromys_,
and many other remarkable forms of animal life, were all subjects of
elaborate memoirs from his untiring pen. These were adorned in every
case with a profusion of admirable illustrations, drawn as often as
possible of the full size of nature. His contributions to the
publications of the Palæontographical Society, mainly upon the extinct
Reptiles of the British Isles, fill more than a thousand pages, and are
illustrated by nearly three hundred plates.