circulation in vessels and respiratory organs," which are amongst the characters of the Nematoneura. Rymer Jones, Arthur Farre, and White Cooper were amongst the pupils attending this course.

In 1835, Owen married the only daughter of his friend and coadjutor, William Clift, Esq., F.R.S. In 1836 he became F.R.S., and was elected, on the retirement of Sir Charles Bell, to the Professorship of Anatomy and Physiology in the College of Surgeons. Parliament, in the purchase and transfer of the Hunterian Museum to the College, had stipulated that its contents should be illustrated in a course of twenty-four lectures. These had previously been divided between the Collegiate Professors of Anatomy and of Surgery. The College had now a man able and willing to grapple with the whole extent of zootomical science, and the stipulated number of lectures was assigned to Owen, with the title of "Hunterian Professor." He continued the useful practice of printing a 'Synopsis' of each course; and those who may have preserved the complete series of these summaries, as they were issued year by year, have the means of estimating the extent of scientific information communicated in the theatre of the College to the Fellows, Members, and privileged Visitors receiving tickets from the Council. In the Introductory Lecture to the last course delivered by Owen as Hunterian Professor, in 1855, he briefly alludes to the different aspects under which anatomy, properly so called, had been presented to his audience. First, as in the Hunterian physiological series, according to the organ, each organ or system or organs being successively reviewed and traced from its most simple to its most complex conditions. Second, each organ traced through the progressive stages of its development in the embryo of the several classes of animals. Third, the structure of the animal considered in its totality, and the zoological series anatomically described from the lowest to the highest species. Two courses or lectures were devoted to the skeletons or hard parts of animals, considered especially in their relations to "philosophical," or what Owen preferred to call "homological anatomy." At length, "having never deemed it the privilege of the Hunterian Professor to repose upon the repetition of the same annual course of lectures, with the mere addition of the chief discoveries of the preceding year,"* Owen entered upon the course of lectures devoted to the *Introductory Lecture to the Course on Palæontology,' appended to Hunter's Essays and Observations,' vol. i. p. 284.

"Organization and Affinities of the Extinct Species of Animals." In the introductory lectures to this course, Owen made known, for the first time, the true position of Hunter in the 'History of Geology and Paleontology.'* Early in the following year Owen received his appointment as Superintendent of the Natural History Departments in the British Museum, and resigned his Professorship and Curatorship in the Royal College of Surgeons. He had, indeed, completed the series of labours by which the Hunterian collections of specimens and drawings were rendered available to the students of physiology, zoology, and paleontology; his proper work at the College was done; and, in that sphere, his services to his country. If the Hunterian collections were worth £30,000 without a catalogue, what was now their value?

We resume the dates of the catalogues. The first volume of the 'Palæontological Catalogue,' containing descriptions of the Fossil Mammalia and Aves, appeared in 4to, with plates, in 1845. Concurrently with these, the catalogues of the recent osteology were proceeded with. These appeared in two 4to volumes of 914 pages, of mostly small print, descriptive of 5906 specimens, in 1853. The second volume of the Palæontology, including the fossil Reptilia and Pisces, was published in 1854. In the meanwhile, a second edition of the first volume of the Physiological Catalogue' had been called for, and was published, at Professor Owen's suggestion, in the more convenient form of 8vo, in 1852, containing descriptions of numerous additional specimens. The convenience of the public had been consulted by the compilation of a general 'Synopsis of the Contents and Arrangement of the Museum,' of which the second edition, 8vo, from Owen's pen, appeared in 1850. In the interests of the Museum and the convenience of voyagers, he drew up a volume of ' Directions for Collecting and Preserving Animals and Parts of Animals,' published by the College in 1835.

All these works, with the stimulus of the Hunterian Lectures, led to a rapid and ever-increasing ratio of acquisitions, chiefly by donations to the Museum. As the curator of a public museum, Owen had from the first foregone every opportunity to form a private collection. Every specimen, of whatever rarity or value, and under whatever circumstances pressed upon him, as a mark of personal regard or as a return for information imparted, he invariably * These lectures are given in the first volume of the Essays and Observations, etc., of John Hunter,' 8vo., 2 vols. Van Voorst.

declined, save on the conditions of permission to transfer the gift to some public museum. All that were suitable as additions to the Hunterian collection were presented to the College. In 1845, the strain of labour producing its effects, Owen availed himself of the exceptional privilege of eight weeks' vacation to visit Italy. He accompanied Robert Brown and the Baron von Buch to Naples, to the meeting of Italian Naturalists held there in that year, and visited the principal cities and museums of Italy. He was everywhere received with marked distinction. At Rome he was the guest of Prince Charles Lucien Bonaparte, at the Palazzo Bonaparte, at that period containing the Natural History collections of the distinguished author of the 'Fauna Italica.' At Florence, Professor Owen was the guest of the Grand Duke, who desired. him to select any subject or series of specimens of wax-models from the laboratory for which Florence has long been famous, and which was then presided over by the accomplished anatomist and artist Signor Luigi Calamai. Professor Owen signified his preference for the series illustrating the anatomy of the Torpedo; and at the same time intimated his wish that they should be donations to the museum of the College, explaining the principle on which he had refrained from commencing any private collection. The Grand Duke graciously acceded thus far, that the donation being intended as a mark of esteem for the Professor, he was to regard them as a gift to himself, with liberty to transfer the specimens as his own donation, if he thought them suitable, to the Museum of the College of Surgeons. On the arrival of this beautiful series of wax-models, Professor Owen accordingly presented them to the College.

The original museum in which Owen commenced his labours at the College, in 1828, was a single, rather heavily ornamented, and not well-lit apartment, with one gallery. In 1835 a more spacious and better-lit hall, with two galleries, designed by Mr., afterwards Sir C. Barry, was substituted for it; to this were added a second, similar but smaller hall; and a third, larger hall; the whole museum, at the conclusion of Owen's curatorship, in 1856, affording at least ten times the amount of exhibition space, and every portion of it well filled.

The proportion of Mr. Owen's labours devoted to the elucidation of those of his great precursor John Hunter, will ever constitute an element in the estimate of his character. There are

few examples in the history of science of the devotion of so much labour, by an original investigator, and not a mere commentator, to the reputation of a predecessor.

Some of Hunter's published papers had been collected in his lifetime from the Philosophical Transactions' to constitute the work entitled 'Observations on Certain Parts of the Animal Economy,' 4to, 1786. Professor Owen added to these papers every other on cognate subjects that Hunter had published, or sanctioned. the publication of, during his lifetime, together with the "Croonian Lectures" which had been read before the Royal Society from 1776 to 1782, and brought them out in an octavo edition. The Animal Economy' thus enlarged, with a preface descriptive of Hunter's real discoveries, which had been more or less misunderstood or overlooked by previous commentators, was published in 1837. The evidence given by Mr. Clift before the Parliamentary Committee on Medical Education had revealed the fact that, during the period between the demise of Hunter (of whom Clift was the last articled apprentice or pupil) in 1793, and the purchase of the "Collection" in 1799, he had availed himself of the manuscripts remaining with the museum in his care, to copy portions of them for his instruction. The portions selected being chiefly those on comparative anatomy and physiology, removed by Home in 1800, and afterwards destroyed. Certain extracts from these copies were communicated by Clift to Owen during the formation of the Physiological Catalogue, and added, by Mr. Clift's permission, as 'Notes' (vol. iii. p. v, etc.). On the demise of Mr. Clift, these transcripts came into Owen's possession, and he published them in two octavo volumes, entitled 'Essays and Observations on Natural History, Anatomy, etc., by John Hunter' (1861). The labours by which they were prepared for press are briefly detailed in the preface. The original copies by Clift were deposited by Owen in the library of the Royal College of Surgeons; and in the dedication of this work "to the Fellows and Members of the Royal College of Surgeons in England," Owen speaks of it as "the last of his labours in making known the thoughts and works of the founder of Philosophical Surgery."

The more congenial labour of comparing the Hunterian preparations with recent dissections, chiefly of exotic animals supplied by the Zoological Society, is at once the key to the secret of Owen's attainment of such profound knowledge of comparative

anatomy, and the reason why most of his papers have appeared in the Transactions of that Society; while the dissection of so many animals enabled him to enrich the Hunterian series with many contributions, supplying defective links or affording further valuable demonstrations.

The first paper communicated by Mr. Owen to the Royal Society was on the mammary glands of that strange duck-billed quadruped the Ornithorhynchus paradoxus; it was published in the Philosophical Transactions in 1832. This was followed by another, on the ova of the same animal, in 1834.

The

Some discussion with the famous Geoffroy St. Hilaire, who maintained the oviparity and non-mammiferous nature of the Ornithorhynchus, ensued. But Owen's inference from the structure of the ovisac, of the corpus luteum and of the uterine ovum, that the latter must be developed in utero, and the young be born alive, has been adopted in physiology. He was elected "Corresponding Member" of the Academy of Sciences, Institute of France. problem still remained how a quadruped, with a beak like a duck, and without a nipple, could suck. In 1834 Professor Owen received specimens of apparently new-born Ornithorhynchi, which he minutely described in a paper printed in the 'Transactions of the Zoological Society.' The beak was soft and short, the mouth adapted to be applied to the areola on which the milk-ducts terminate, and to receive the milk that would be injected into the mouth by a muscle surrounding the large mammary gland. Professor Owen's next step was to settle the questions undecided on the generation of the marsupial animals, viz. the period of uterine gestation, the exact condition of the new-born young, the mode of its passage to the external pouch, and the term of its suspension there. For this purpose he took advantage of the collection of kangaroos, then living at the establishment of the Zoological Society at Kingston; the impregnated females being transferred, for better observation, to the gardens in Regent's Park.

The account of these experiments is contained in the Philosophical Transactions for 1834. It is to these investigations we owe the knowledge of the state of the new-born kangaroo (Macropus major). But an inch long, naked and blind, with hind legs shorter than its fore legs, the very reverse of the adult, it is transferred, after thirty-eight days' gestation, by its mother's lips to her nipple within her pouch, where it clings and hangs for a period of