Sir Richard Owen, M.D., F.R.S., etc. (1804-1892), the celebrated comparative anatomist and palæontologist, made it possible for us to see what the extinct monsters were when he enabled us to construct scientifically the models of the megatherium, plesiosaurus, and other animals of remote ages. It has been well said of him that “the most characteristic of his faculties was a powerful scientific imagination. Fragments of bone which might be meaningless to less alert observers enabled him to divine the structure and to present the images of whole groups of extinct animal forms.”
At the suggestion of Dr. Abernethy (whose pupil he had been) he was invited in 1828 to prepare the catalogue of the Hunterian collection in the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, of which Mr. Clift (whom he eventually succeeded and whose daughter he married) was conservator. This great work largely occupied some of the best years of Owen’s life, the three quarto volumes on the Fossil Vertebrates and Cephalopods of the collection not appearing till 1855. Meanwhile he had given to the world his Odontography, his Lectures on Comparative Anatomy and Physiology (which won a continental reputation), and his famous work on the Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton. In 1849 he issued an important memoir On Parthenogenesis.
In 1856 Owen was appointed Superintendent of the Department of Natural History in the British Museum, which, through his untiring exertions, was at last to be suitably housed at South Kensington. In 1861 he published his manual of Paleontology; from 1865 to 1877 a succession of works on British Fossil Reptiles and the Fossil Reptiles of South Africa.
F. G. Henle (1809-1885) so early as 1840 advocated the germ theory of disease. It was first suggested, however, by Latour’s discovery of the yeast plant in 1836.
St. George Mivart, M.D., F.R.S. (born 1827), the distinguished anatomist and zoologist, is to a certain extent the opponent of Darwin, as he denies that the doctrine of Evolution is applicable to the human intellect. He is the author of many works on anatomy, biology, and zoology.
Thomas Huxley, F.R.S., M.D. (born 1825), the famous physiologist and comparative anatomist and biologist, is a well-known writer on natural science, and the most prominent of the scientific opponents of revealed religion.
Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace (born 1822), the eminent naturalist, published his Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection in 1870, and in 1878, in his volume Tropical Nature, still further contributes to our knowledge of sexual selection, etc.
Ernst Haeckel (born 1834), a celebrated German naturalist and writer on science, is the chief supporter in Germany of Darwin’s theories. It may be remembered in this connection that these were anticipated to some extent by Lamarck (1744-1829) and Goethe (1749-1832).
Herbert Spencer (born 1820) has devoted his life mainly to the working out of his “System of Synthetic Philosophy,” which proposed “to carry out in its application to all orders of phenomena the general law of evolution.”
George J. Romanes, F.R.S. (born 1848), an ardent member of the Darwinian school, is a distinguished physiologist and biologist.