cated the entire suppression of intramural slaughter-houses, and of the concomitant evil of the passage of droves of sheep and cattle through the streets of London. For the Great exhibition of 1851 he was appointed a member of the preliminary committee of organisation, and he acted as chairman of the jury on raw materials, alimentary substances, &c., and published an elaborate report on their awards. He also delivered at the same time to the Society of Arts a lecture on ‘Raw Animal Products, and their Uses in Manufacture.’
Until 1852 he occupied small apartments within the building of the College of Surgeons; these, however inconvenient they might be in some respects, furnished him with unusual facilities for pursuing his work by night as well as by day in the museum, dissecting rooms, and library of that institution. But in 1852 the queen gave him the charming cottage called Sheen Lodge in Richmond Park, where he resided until the end of his life. In 1853 he went to Paris with his wife, and lectured in French at the ‘Institut.’ Two years later he revisited Paris in the capacity of juror of the Universal exhibition, being appointed chairman of the jury on ‘Prepared and Preserved Alimentary Substances.’ For his services Napoleon III created him a knight of the Legion of Honour. In 1855 he attended the opening ceremony at the Crystal Palace, Sydenham, in the grounds of which he had suggested and devised the exhibition of models of extinct animals. To these he wrote a guide-book (London, 1854, 12mo), entitled ‘Geology and Inhabitants of the Ancient World.’
In 1856, when Owen had reached the zenith of his fame, and was recognised throughout Europe as the first anatomist of his day, a change came over his career. Difficulties with the governing body of the College of Surgeons, arising from his impatience at being required to perform what he considered the lower administrative duties of his office, caused him readily to take advantage of an offer from the trustees of the British Museum to undertake a newly created post, that of superintendent of the natural history departments of the museum.
The years 1827–56, which Owen spent in the service of the Royal College of Surgeons, form the first of the two periods into which his career may be divided; and in the course of these years he mainly made his reputation as an anatomist. His earliest work in connection with the museum was the preparation of the monumental ‘Descriptive and Illustrative Catalogue of the Physiological Series of Comparative Anatomy,’ which was published in five quarto volumes between 1833 and 1840. This work, which has been taken as a model for many other subsequently published catalogues, contains a minute description of nearly four thousand preparations, including, besides those of Hunter, many added by Owen himself. The labour involved in producing it was greatly increased by the circumstance that the origin of a large number of Hunter's specimens had not been preserved, and even the species of the animals from which they were derived had to be discovered by tedious researches among old documents, or by comparison with fresh dissections. It was mainly to aid him in this work that he engaged upon the long series of dissections of animals which died from time to time in the gardens of the Zoological Society, the descriptions of which, as published in the ‘Proceedings and Transactions’ of the society, form a precious fund of information upon the comparative anatomy of the higher vertebrates. The series commences with an account of the anatomy of an orang utan, which was communicated to the first scientific meeting of the society, held on the evening of Tuesday, 9 Nov. 1830, and was continued with descriptions of dissections of the beaver, suricate, acouchy, Thibet bear, gannet, crocodile, armadillo, seal, kangaroo, tapir, toucan, flamingo, hyrax, hornbill, cheetah, capybara, pelican, kinkajou, wombat, giraffe, dugong, apteryx, wart-hog, walrus, great ant-eater, and many others.
Among the many obscure subjects in anatomy and physiology on which he threw much light by his researches at this period were several connected with the generation, development, and structure of the Marsupialia and Monotrema, groups which always had great interest for him. It is a curious coincidence that his first paper communicated to the Royal Society (in 1832), ‘On the Mammary Glands of the Ornithorhynchus paradoxus,’ was one of a series which only terminated in almost the last which he offered to the same society (in 1887), being a description of a newly excluded young of the same animal, published in the ‘Proceedings’ (xlii. 391).
On the completion of the ‘Catalogue of the Physiological Series,’ his curatorial duties led him to undertake the catalogues of the osteological collections of recent and extinct forms. This task necessitated minute studies of the modifications of the skeleton in all vertebrated animals, and researches into their dentition, the latter being finally embodied in his great work on ‘Odontography’ (1840–5), in which he brought a vast amount of light out
