Part 21

‘The great Master in whose dissecting-rooms, as well as in the public galleries of comparative anatomy, I was privileged to work, held that “species were not permanent”; and taught this great and fruitful truth, not doubtfully or hypothetically, but as a fact established inductively on a wide and well-laid basis of observation.’

Further, Owen had the opportunity of listening to some of the debates between Cuvier and Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire on the question of how new species may originate; and ‘on returning home,’ he adds, ‘I was guided in all my work with the hope or endeavour to gain inductive ground for conclusions on these great questions.’ Here, then, was the definite educational result which Owen gained from his visit. It had, moreover, another consequence. It made him known to the French naturalists, then in the front rank of science. His scientific acquirements, coupled with his agreeable manners and facility in speaking and writing French, made him a _persona grata_ in Paris. In 1839 he was elected a corresponding member of the Institute, and read more than one paper there in French.

We have already mentioned the long line of scientific papers which, from 1830 onwards, were the result of Owen’s indomitable energy. This series was now to be interrupted for a moment by the famous _Memoir on the Pearly Nautilus_, a quarto volume of sixty-eight pages, illustrated by eight plates, drawn by himself. The shell of the nautilus, as most persons know, has always been fairly common; but the animal which was given to the Museum of the College of Surgeons in 1831 was, we believe, the first, or nearly the first, which had ever reached this country, and Owen was most fortunate in having the chance of describing such a rarity. His essay, elaborate and exhaustive as it is, was dashed off in less than a year. It was received with a general chorus of praise. Dr Buckland spoke of it as ‘Mr Owen’s admirable work,’ and they were soon in correspondence on the way in which the nautilus sinks and rises in the water. Milne Edwards translated it into French, and Oken into German. Nor has the contemporary verdict been reversed by that of posterity. Mr Huxley says of the _Memoir_ that it

‘placed its author, at a bound, in the first rank of monographers. There is nothing better in the _Mémoires sur les Mollusques_, I would even venture to say nothing so good, were it not that Owen had Cuvier’s great work for a model; certainly, in the sixty years that have elapsed since the publication of this remarkable monograph it has not been excelled’ (ii. 306).

This essay seems to have given Owen a taste for the group to which the nautilus belongs. At the conclusion of the _Memoir_ he proposed a new arrangement of it, now generally accepted, which includes the fossil as well as the recent forms; and, as occasion presented itself, he described other species and genera. The merit of a memoir on the fossil group called ‘belemnites,’ from the Oxford Clay, was the cause assigned for the award to him of the gold medal of the Royal Society in 1846.

Between 1833 and 1840 the long-desired catalogue, in five quarto volumes, made its appearance. Sir William Flower calls it ‘monumental’; a singularly happy epithet, for it commemorates, as a monument should do, alike the founder of the Museum and the industrious anatomist who had minutely described the four thousand specimens of which the ‘physiological series’—or, as we should now say, the series of organs—then consisted. Nor, though the arrangement is obsolete, can the work itself be regarded as without value, even at the present time. It has already served as a model for the catalogues of many other museums, and has taken its place in the literature of the subject. It is, in fact, an elaborate treatise on comparative anatomy from the point of view of the modifications of special organs. The thirteen years spent over it can hardly appear an excessively long time when we remember the work involved, and also the fact that the college had from the first recognized the duty of filling up gaps in the collection as occasion offered. Many of the specimens recorded in this catalogue had been prepared by Owen himself.

During the years that Owen spent upon the catalogue his position at the 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.