Old Friends at Cambridge and Elsewhere

by John Willis Clark

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.

‘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.