Old Friends at Cambridge and Elsewhere

by John Willis Clark

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.’