Part 20

He was a High Churchman, but a High Churchman with a difference. He belonged to the school of Pusey and Liddon rather than to that of the modern Ritualist, whose doings were as alien to his convictions and feelings as those of the party whom he scornfully styled ‘those Protestants.’ I have heard him called narrow and intolerant. I beg leave to refer such detractors to the sermon preached by him on the Sunday after the death of Frederick Denison Maurice. And this brings me to what was, perhaps, the leading principle of his whole life—his absolute honesty and fearlessness. He held certain beliefs and certain opinions himself, which he cherished, and which were of vital importance to himself; but he did not shut his eyes to the possibility that others who held diametrically opposite views might be in the right also. And if he found a man sincere, no considerations of party, of respectability, of imaginary dangers concealed behind opinions held to be heretical, would prevent him from speaking out and proclaiming his admiration.

In manners Luard had much of the stately courtesy which we commonly ascribe to the last century, joined to a vivacious impulsiveness due, no doubt, to his French extraction. This impulsiveness led him into a rapidity of thought and utterance which often caused him to be misunderstood. He said what came first into his thoughts, and corrected it afterwards; but, unfortunately for him, people remembered the first words used, and forgot the explanation. Hence he was often misunderstood, and credited with opinions he did not really hold. He delighted in society, and few men knew better how to deal with it, or how to make his house an agreeable centre of Cambridge life. In this he was ably seconded by his admirable wife, _qui savait tenir un salon_, as the French say, more successfully than is usual in this country. Without her help he would hardly have been able to find the time required for his continual hospitalities. The house was different from any other house that I have ever known, and reflected, more directly, the peculiar gifts and tastes of its owner. The pictures, the china, the books that lined the walls, bespoke the cultivated scholar; but the modern volumes that lay on the tables showed that he was no dry archaeologist, but full of enthusiasm for all that was best in modern literature. He had a keen sense of humour, and an admirable memory; and when the conversation turned that way, would tell endless stories of Cambridge life, or repeat page after page of his favourite Thackeray. At the same time he did not engross the conversation, but drew his guests out, and led each insensibly to what was interesting to him or to her. It is sad to think that all this has passed away; that exactly one month after Luard’s death his friends stood again beside his grave to see his only child laid in it; that his house will pass into alien hands; and that his library will share the fate of similar collections. ‘_Eheu! quanto minus est cum aliis versari quam tui meminisse._’

RICHARD OWEN[120].

A scientific naturalist who lived in England in the second quarter of this present century may be accounted a fortunate man. On the one hand was the vast field of the universe, undivided, unallotted; on the other, a public eager for instruction. At the present day, when men go to and fro, and knowledge is increased, we find it hard to realize the isolation of England until after the close of the great war, or the fear of invasion that absorbed men’s thoughts until after Trafalgar. That fear removed, the modern development of the nation began. The number of those who resorted to the Universities increased by leaps and bounds. Public school life, as we understand it, was developed. As a natural consequence, the flower of the English youth were no longer content with the knowledge that had satisfied their fathers and grandfathers. The old paths were too narrow for them. The convulsions which had shaken the continent had not been without their effect even here; and when Europe was again open, account had to be taken of the work of continental thinkers. Their achievements must be mastered, continued, developed. It was allowed on all hands, except by that small class who can neither learn nor forget, that the time for a new departure in scientific education had arrived. It was the good fortune of Richard Owen to be ready just when he was wanted, to take occasion by the hand, and to become the leader in biological research.

How did he effect this? How did a young man, launched on the great world of London with no powerful connexions,

‘Break his birth’s invidious bar, And grasp the skirts of happy chance, And breast the blows of circumstance And grapple with his evil star?’

To take a metaphor from our representative system, Owen was the member for biological science in the parliament of letters for nearly half a century. And yet he was not a great thinker; his name is not associated with any far-reaching generalization, or any theory fruitful of wide results. As a comparative anatomist, and as a paleontologist, he did plenty of good and solid work. But these pursuits are most commonly those of a recluse. The man who engages in them must be content, as a general rule, with the four walls of his laboratory, and the applause of a small circle of experts. Not so Professor Owen, as he was most commonly designated, even after he had received knighthood. He contrived to lead an essentially public life; to be seen everywhere; to have his last paper talked about in fashionable drawing-rooms quite as much as in learned societies. How did he effect this? We think that the answer to our question is to be found—first, in the general eagerness for scientific instruction which was one of the characteristics of the age in which he lived; and, secondly, in his own many-sidedness. He was by no means one of those authors ‘who are all author,’ against whom Byron launched some of his most brilliant sarcasms. He was a man of science; but he was also a polished gentleman of varied accomplishments.

It is to be regretted that such a man has not found a biographer more competent than his grandson and namesake; but the reader who reaches the end of the second volume will be rewarded by a masterly essay by Mr Huxley on Owen’s place in science. This is a remarkable composition; not merely for what it says, but for what it does not say; and we recommend those who would understand it thoroughly, not merely to read it more than once, but to cultivate the useful art of reading between the lines. Of a very different nature to _The Life of Owen_ is the article which Sir W. H. Flower has contributed to the _Dictionary of National Biography_. It is of necessity much compressed, but it contains all that is really essential for the proper comprehension of Owen’s scientific career, and praise and blame are meted out with calm impartiality. For ourselves, we have a sincere admiration for Owen, but an admiration which does not exclude a readiness to admit that he had defects. In what we are about to say we do not propose to draw a fancy portrait. If we nothing extenuate, we shall set down naught in malice. In a word, we shall try to present him as he was, not as he might have been.

* * * * *

Richard Owen was born at Lancaster, 20 July, 1804. His father was a West India merchant; his mother, Catherine Parrin, was descended from a French Huguenot family. She is said to have been a woman of refinement and intelligence, with great skill in music, a talent which she transmitted to her son. In appearance she was handsome and Spanish-looking, with dark eyes and hair. Owen delighted to dwell on his mother’s charm of manner, and all that he owed to her early training and example. We can well believe this, and the Life is full of touching references to her solicitude for her darling son. The interest she felt in all that he did even led her to read through his scientific papers and his catalogue of the Hunterian collection, with what profit to herself we are not informed. Her husband died in 1809; but the family seem to have been left in fairly affluent circumstances, and continued to live, as before, at Lancaster. Owen’s education began at the grammar-school there in 1810, when he was six years old, and ended in 1820, when he was apprenticed to a local surgeon. Of his schooldays but little record has been preserved. One of the masters described him as lazy and impudent; he is said to have had no fondness for study of any kind except heraldry; and his sister used to relate that as a boy he was ‘very small and slight, and exceedingly mischievous.’

Those who value the records of boyhood for the sake of traces of the tastes which made the man celebrated, will be rewarded by the perusal of the pages which record Owen’s four years as a surgeon’s apprentice at Lancaster. Not only will they find that he worked diligently at the curative side of his profession, but that, his master being surgeon to the gaol, he had the opportunity of attending post-mortem examinations, and so laid the foundation of his knowledge of the structure of the human frame. Here too we catch a glimpse of the future comparative anatomist; but the story of ‘The Negro’s Head,’ here given in the words used by Owen when he told it himself, is unfortunately too long for quotation, and is certainly far too good to be spoilt by abbreviation.

In October 1824 Owen matriculated at the University of Edinburgh. There, in addition to the courses that were obligatory, he attended the ‘outside’ lectures in comparative anatomy delivered by Dr John Barclay. From these he derived the greatest benefit, and used in after-years to speak of Barclay with affectionate regard, as ‘my revered preceptor.’ It is noteworthy that, while at Edinburgh, Owen and one of his friends founded a students’ society, which at his suggestion was called, by a sort of prophetic instinct, the Hunterian Society. Barclay must have decided very quickly that he had to do with no common pupil, for at the end of April 1825, when Owen had been barely six months in Edinburgh, he advised him to move to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, and study under Dr. Abernethy, then near the close of his brilliant but eccentric career. Armed with a letter of introduction from Barclay, Owen set out for London, where he had ‘literally not one single friend.’ No wonder that he felt ‘an indescribable sense of desolation’ as he walked up Holborn, and that ‘the number of strange faces that kept passing by increased that feeling.’ What happened next is very characteristic of the strange mixture of roughness and kindness which was natural to his new patron.

‘Abernethy had just finished lecturing, and was evidently in anything but the best of tempers, being surrounded by a small crowd of students waiting about to ask him questions. Owen was just screwing up his courage to attack this formidable personage and state his business, when Abernethy suddenly turned upon him and said: “And what do you want?” After presenting the letter Abernethy glanced at it for a moment, stuffed it into his pocket, and vouchsafed the gracious reply of “Oh!” As this did not seem to point to anything very definite, Owen was turning to go, when Abernethy called after him: “Here; come to breakfast to-morrow morning at eight,” and presenting him with his card, added, “That’s my address.” What were the terms in which Dr Barclay had spoken of him Owen never knew, but he thought they must have been favourable, for when he presented himself next morning at Abernethy’s residence, and was anticipating anything but an agreeable _tête-à-tête_ with the great doctor, he found him, to his surprise, considerably smoothed down and quite pleasant in his manner. The result of the meeting was that Abernethy offered him the post of prosector for his lectures’ (i. 30).

A year later (August 18, 1826) Owen obtained the membership of the College of Surgeons, and set up as a medical practitioner in Carey Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where he gradually obtained a small practice among lawyers.

We have no wish to underrate Owen’s brilliant talents, or his perseverance, or his power of sustained work with a definite end in view; but at the same time it would be absurd to deny that he had good-fortune to thank for a large part of his first successes. What else made Abernethy, at their first interview, give him just the appointment best calculated to bring his peculiar gifts into the light of day? What else made the same patron procure his appointment, two years later, as assistant-conservator of the Hunterian collections, out of which all his future celebrity was developed? He might have been ‘exceedingly well informed in all that relates to his profession, an excellent anatomist, and sober and sedate very far beyond any young man I ever knew,’ as one who was in a position to know said of him in 1830, and yet have ‘bloomed unseen,’ an obscure practitioner in ‘the dusky purlieus of the law,’ had not the fickle goddess selected him as the special recipient of her favours.

Owen’s active life in London divides itself naturally into two periods, each containing nearly thirty years. The first, during which he was connected with the Royal College of Surgeons, extended from 1827 to 1856; the second, during which he was nominally superintendent of the biological side of the British Museum, from 1856 to 1883.

Those who would rightly understand his work during the former period must of necessity take into account the history and extent of the vast collection which he was expected to catalogue and to develop, for it dominated and directed all his studies. It was formed by the celebrated surgeon, John Hunter, between 1763 and 1793, in which year he died. In studying it, one is at a loss what to admire most—the beauty of the specimens themselves, and the admirable clearness with which those preserved in spirit have been dissected and mounted; or the labour and self-denial which brought them together in the midst of the incessant occupations of a large practice; or the almost prophetic instinct which divined what posterity would require in the way of such aids to study. It was Hunter’s object to illustrate the phenomena of life in all organisms, whether in health or in disease. For this purpose he collected as widely as he could. There is an osteological series, and a physiological series (in spirit), which exhibits the different organs, digestive, circulatory, and the like, in order, and traces their development from the simplest to the most complicated form. To the Invertebrata he had devoted special attention. He had secured, through his friend Sir Joseph Banks, many of the treasures collected during Cook’s voyages; and he had purchased rarities as occasion offered. Of insects he had a large collection. Nor were his observations limited to the animal kingdom. Whenever any physiological process could be illustrated by vegetable life, vegetables were pressed into the service. Nor did he fail to recognize the truth—which some persons still refuse to accept—that the remains of extinct animals are only in their proper place when side by side with those still living on the earth. ‘His collection of fossils,’ says Owen in one of his prefaces, ‘was the largest and most select of any in this country.’

To contain this collection Hunter had built a special museum in Castle Street, Leicester Square, which was open to public inspection on certain days. After his death his executors, in accordance with his will, offered the collection to the Government. ‘Buy preparations?’ exclaimed Mr Pitt; ‘why, I have not money enough for gunpowder!’ Ultimately, however, the House of Commons agreed to give £15,000 for it, just one-fifth of the sum that Hunter is said to have spent upon it. Next arose the further question, who should take care of it. The Royal Society, it is said, did not consider it ‘an object of importance to the general study of natural history’; the British Museum was literary, not scientific; and finally, in 1799, the Corporation of Surgeons, as it was then called, accepted it, under the condition that a proper catalogue should be made, a conservator appointed, and twenty-four lectures in explanation of it delivered annually in the college. Soon afterwards the Corporation of Surgeons became the Royal College of Surgeons, and a building, to which Parliament contributed £27,500, was built for its reception. This was opened in 1813.

When Owen was appointed assistant-conservator of these collections thirty-four years had elapsed since Hunter’s death. During that time they had been preserved from damage by the devoted care of Mr William Clift, who, after being Hunter’s assistant for a short time, had been appointed conservator, first by the executors, and subsequently by the college. The general arrangement had been prescribed by Hunter, but no descriptive catalogue existed, as it had been, unfortunately, Hunter’s habit to trust to his memory for the history of his specimens. Further, though lists, more or less imperfect, drawn up either by Hunter himself or under his direction, had been preserved, the bulk of his papers had been destroyed by Sir Everard Home, his brother-in-law and executor. ‘There is but one thing more to be done—to destroy the collection,’ was Clift’s remark when he heard of this act of cynical wickedness. In the scarcity, therefore, of documentary evidence, other expedients had to be resorted to for the identification of the specimens which Hunter had dissected, or had preserved entire in spirit. As Owen remarks in the preface to the first volume of his descriptive catalogue (published in 1833), ‘It was necessary to consult the book of Nature.’ At first it was no easy matter to procure the animals required; but after the establishment of the Zoological Society this difficulty was in a great measure removed, and more than two hundred dissections were made by Owen in the course of the work incident to the preparation of the first volume of the catalogue.

This sketch of the Hunterian collections, which we would gladly have worked out in greater detail had our space allowed us to do so, will perhaps be sufficient to indicate to our readers the nature of the field of research on which Owen was about to enter. It was, in fact, an undiscovered country, of which he was to be the pioneer. One would like to know whether he had any idea of what the work he was about to undertake implied; and whether he had any misgivings as to his own fitness for it. He was only twenty-three years old, so perhaps, as youth is sanguine, he entered upon it with a light heart, thinking—if he paused to think—that he had strength of will sufficient to compensate for defect of years and knowledge. ‘On vieillit vite sur les champs de bataille.’ His previous training must have been in the main professional; he could have gained at most only a glimpse of comparative anatomy at the feet of Dr Barclay; the great writers on the subject, Buffon, Daubenton, Cuvier, and the rest, must have been mere names to him. Moreover, he was obliged, for lucre’s sake, to continue the profession of a surgeon, and, though he gradually dropped it, he must, for some time at least, have spent a good deal of time over it. Besides this, he probably assisted Clift in the brief catalogue of the Hunterian collections that appeared between 1833 and 1840. But, while thus engaged, he found time for study. For three years he attempted no original work; and when he did begin to write (his first paper is dated 9 November, 1830), it is evident that the previous years had been spent in wise preparation. There is no trace of the novice in the papers that followed each other in quick succession; they evince a complete mastery of the subject from the historical, as well as from the anatomical, side. The mere number of these communications, addressed principally to the Zoological Society, is almost past belief. Before the end of 1855 more than 250 had appeared, many of which were of considerable length, and enriched with elaborate drawings made by himself. But what is more surprising still is the versatility displayed in their composition. Nowadays a biologist is compelled to specialize. By ‘the custom of the country,’ to borrow a legal phrase, he selects his own subject, and is expected not to poach on that of his neighbours. But when Owen began to work, these laws existed not, or at any rate not for him. The very nature of his work obliged him to study in quick succession the most diverse structures; and, as death does not accommodate itself to human convenience, he could not tell from day to day what animals would be sent from the Zoological Gardens to his dissecting-room. An excellent bibliography of his works at the end of the second volume of the _Life_ enables us to trace his studies in detail. For our present purpose we will only point out that between 1831 and 1835 he had written papers (among many others) on the orang-outang, beaver, Thibet bear, gannet, armadillo, seal, kangaroo, tapir, cercopithecus, crocodile, toucan, hornbill, pelican, flamingo, besides various Invertebrates.

While Owen was preparing himself for his serious attack on the catalogue an event occurred which had an important influence on his scientific development. Cuvier came to England to collect materials for his work on fishes, and naturally visited the Hunterian collection. Owen has preserved a singularly modest account of his introduction to the great French naturalist:

‘In the year 1830 I made Cuvier’s personal acquaintance at the Museum of the College of Surgeons, and was specially deputed to show and explain to him such specimens as he wished to examine. There was no special merit in my being thus deputed, the fact being that I was the only person available who could speak French, and who had at the same time some knowledge of the specimens. Cuvier kindly invited me to visit the Jardin des Plantes in the following year’ (i. 49).

Accordingly, Owen spent the month of August 1831 in Paris. It has been frequently stated, says his biographer, that Cuvier and his collection ‘made a great impression on Owen, and gave a direction to his after-studies of fossil remains,’ a position which he contests on the ground that neither Owen’s diary nor his letters describing the visit warrant such a conclusion. We do not attach much importance to this argument, but we feel certain that the Museum of the Jardin des Plantes, from its unfortunate subdivision into departments widely separated structurally from each other, could not have stimulated anybody in that particular direction. That Cuvier was, to a very large extent, Owen’s master in comparative anatomy is undeniable; he quotes him with respect, not to say with reverence, in almost every page of his writings, and the ‘Prix Cuvier’ adjudged to him in 1857 probably gave him more pleasure than all his other distinctions. Cuvier’s method, as set forth in _Les Ossemens Fossiles_, of illustrating and explaining extinct animals by comparison with recent was closely followed by his illustrious disciple. But this principle might easily have been learnt—and in our judgment was learnt—by a study of his works at home. On the other hand, Owen has stated, in unequivocal terms, the direction in which Cuvier did exert a special influence upon him. In his _Anatomy of Vertebrates_ (iii. 786), published in 1868, he says:

‘At the close of my studies at the Jardin des Plantes, Paris, in 1831, I returned strongly moved to lines of research bearing upon the then prevailing phases of thought on some general biological questions.