Part 22

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.

It had been manifest for a considerable period that the British Museum 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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