SIR RICHARD OWEN.
TT is, perhaps, natural that, in the public estimate of a
very long, very honourable and most industrious life such as that of the late Sir Richard Owen, there should be a certain want of point and precision. The records of his life and work, which have been multiplied during the past week, though complete enough as an index to his varied interests, hardly account, either for his isolation as a man of science, or for the strength of his claims as an original inquirer. Sir Richard Owen was not best known for his best work. It was his for- tune more than once to be " understanded of the people" in small things, which have been remembered, while greater things have been forgotten. Yet his discovery of the true relation of the skull to the skeleton was just such a sudden advance as strikes the imagination. The existing theory which he set himself to test was itself ingenious and strange. Man, it was said, was double,—structurally, he could be cut in two at the neck. The head was a second trunk, with all its systems complete. In it the brain did duty for the spinal marrow ; the skull was the vertebral column. The mouth was equivalent to the stomach, the nose to the lungs and thorax, the jaw to the limbs. Against this, Owen showed that the head, so far from being a second trunk piled upon the first, was a continuation of the vertebrx, greatly modified, and each segment of the skull was a repetition of every other segment of the body. The jaws were as much an appendage of a vertebra as the ribs, and the arms the same, which, originally belonging to the occipital vertebra, had dropped down on to the shoulders, just as the fins of fishes are often transported from the segment to which they naturally belong, and have " floated " from the pelvis to the throat.
Having once established the fact that the vertebrate animals were built up in sections, which, however modified, could in all cases be identified as parts of the spinal column, natural inference would have seemed to lead directly to the theory of evolution. Yet Owen is commonly spoken of as an opponent of the theory of evolution. That is so clearly contrary to the nature of his conclusions in practice, that it is well to see what was the immediate result in his wind of his great discovery. His highly specialised knowledge of anatomy seems to have changed the direction of the speculations which had prompted his first inquiry. His discovery of a symmetrical plan of structure in vertebrate creatures gave him an exaggerated notion of the perfection of that particular form of animal creation. " Ver- tebrates " were first, and the rest nowhere. He cuddled his pets with an exclusive fondness, which for a time left him almost indifferent to the claims of less favoured races. He sanctified their past, glorified their present, prophesied for them a future of infinite expansion, and descried a possible place for their extra-terrestrial existence in the planets. The nature of the constructive and speculative efforts which led Owen to these conclusions gives some insight into the strength and weakness of his powers of physical inquiry. Fortified by his discovery of the completeness and simplicity of vertebrate structure, and aware that this structure was present in animals of the highest development, he conceived that he had only to trace their differences back to the simplest form to find the "original" which was first created by a divine archi- tect. By a process of elimination of non-essential varia- tions, he reconstructed the " architype " of the vertebrate creation—the creature, that is, as God first made it—the inference being that, as we now find them, the verte- brates have in a sense "made themselves" by evolution and adaptation. The " architype " of which Owen con- structed a skeleton and portrait, is a kind of fish, in which the vertebrm control the structure entirely, and the "appendages," which in modern creatures have developed into fins, feet, legs, arms, wings, or jaws, are kept almost in as great subordination to the vertebral column as in the snakes and boa-constrictor. It is certainly a very "odd fish." But Owen seems to have believed in it firmly for a time, and spoke complacently of his " architype " as the "divine exemplar." He even referred to it in a curious piece of argument as evidence of the divine intention of creating man, even if man were not the first effort of creation. "The recog- nition of a divine exemplar for the vertebrated animals, proves that the knowledge of such a being as man must have existed before man appeared ; for the divine mind which planned the architype also foresaw its modifications." Con- fident in the extent of his knowledge of extinct forms as well as of those now existing, he declares that the "conceivable modifications of the vertebrate architype are very far from being exhausted." Our vertebrates have only two pairs of limbs. But the rudiments of many other pairs are present in many species ; and though they never have developed in this planet, it is quite conceivable that certain of them may be developed, if this type be that on which the inhabitants of any other planet are organised. His conjectures as to the probability of the inhabitants of Jupiter being vertebrates like ourselves, are ingenious and picturesque. The laws of light, as of gravitation, being the same in the planet Jupiter as here," he writes, "the eyes of such creatures as may dis- port themselves in the soft, reflected beams of its moons, will probably be organised on the same principles as those of animals of like grades of organisation on the earth ; and the inference that the vertebrate type is the basis of the organisa- tion of some of the inhabitants of other planets will not appear so hazardous, when it is remembered that the orbits, or pro- tected cavities of the eyes of vertebrates, are themselves con- structed of modified vertebrx."
It seems sufficiently clear from these specimens of arguments, that Owen's mind was more fixed on the importance of the dis- covery he had made than sensitive to its suggestion of the scope of evolution. His astonishing acquaintance with all the bones in the charnel-house of nature, made him a severe and cautious critic of the exuberance of the "evolutionists." His atti- tude towards speculation of this kind was that of the family solicitor familiar with all the titles and incumbrances, towards the impatient heir of family acres. It was in this spirit that he examined and compared the skeletons of the whole tribe of anthropoid apes in reference to the new theories of the descent of man ; and, as a result of the application of the comparative method in its strictest sense, he pronounced from the evidence before him, "a confutation of the notion of the transformation of the ape into the man." "Man," he declared, "was the sole species of his genus, the sole representative of his order and
sub-class." This announcement was eagerly welcomed by those who resented the " cock-sureness" and not too courteous attitude of the new school of biologists ; and accident, rather than design, had lent additional weight to Owen's authority as an elected, and by no means reluctant, champion of Ortho- doxy. The story still remains as one of the popular triumphs of "science," and the belief that Owen "discovered" the past existence of the Dinornis from the evidence of a single bone, was sufficient to back his opinion of the "descent of man" based on the examination of many bones. This prophecy and its fulfilment are both sufficiently interesting. He had received, not a bone, but a piece of a bone, six inches long, with the ends broken off; and he declared from its shape that it was a thigh-bone, and from its structure that it was the bone of a bird very like an ostrich. The material and form were, however, heavier than that in the corresponding limb of the ostrich. "So far as my skill in interpreting bony fragments may be credited," he said, "I am willing to risk the reputation for it on the statement that there has existed, if there does not now exist, in New Zealand a struthious bird, not quite equal in size to an ostrich, and of a heavier and more sluggish species." This was in 1839. In 1842 a missionary at "Poverty Bay" heard the Maori legends of the men, and found some of the bones of the extinct bird, which, in various sizes, is now known as the Dinornis. The fulfilment, following so quickly on the prophecy, is probably unique in the story of palmontology. It seemed that the pro- fessor who had " constructed " a bird from a bone had the master-key to the scheme of creation. It does not seem to have occurred to those who were not dazzled by his success in the case of the Dinornis to point out that the Dinotherium, an extinct mammal with pendent tusks, of which the skull only had then been discovered, was still represented in all popular works as something with the shapeless body of the walrus, and lying down (apparently chewing the cud) with its back to the spectator, because no one could reconstruct its body or legs. It must be admitted, however, that Owen's opinion, so far as he gave one, has been borne out by recent discoveries of the creature's bones. It is pleasant to think that such a long and industrious life closed in surroundings of peace and tranquillity rarely granted even to the most honoured names. The pretty cottage on the verge of Richmond Park, in which the later part of his life was spent, stands on the high ground near the Sheen Gate, and his bedroom commanded a view over the rolling slopes and oak-groves of the most sylvan scene near London. Beneath, within a few yards of his garden, lies the pool at which the deer drink at evening, and beside which the stags do battle in the autumn nights. The choice of the house is said to have been due to his own request to the Prince Consort, who had conveyed to him his wish to see him established in a far more imposing home. There he lived and worked, com- pared and wrote, almost to the last, remaining among a younger generation, not as a mere picturesque survival, but a living monument of single-minded devotion to knowledge.
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