Old Friends at Cambridge and Elsewhere

by John Willis Clark

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.