OWEN, RICHARD

(b. Lancaster, England, 20 July 1804; d. Richmond Park, London, England, 18 December 1892), comparative anatomy, vertebrate paleontology, geology.

Owen, the younger son of Richard and Catherine Parrin Owen, lost his father in 1809. When six years old Owen was enrolled at the Lancaster Grammar School, where he was a younger schoolmate of William Whewell. In 1820 Owen was apprenticed to the first of three Lancaster surgeons under whom he studied. As an apprentice he had access to postmortems and dissections at the local jail, which sparked an early interest in anatomy and started him collecting anatomical specimens. Before completing his apprenticeship, Owen matriculated in October 1824 at the University of Edinburgh, where he attended the anatomical lectures of Alexander Munro Tertius. More importantly, Owen was able to attend the extramural lectures on anatomy given by John Barclay, from whom Owen gained considerable knowledge of comparative anatomy. In April 1825 Barclay recommended that Owen go to London to study at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital with John Abernethy, to whom Barclay addressed a letter of introduction on Owen’s behalf. Abernethy immediately appointed Owen to be his prosector. After qualifying as a member of the Royal College of Surgeons in August 1826, Owen set up practice in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

Abernethy had recognized Owen’s dissecting ability and knowledge of comparative anatomy. As president of the Royal College of Surgeons, Abernethy had Owen appointed assistant to the conservator, William Clift, of the Hunterian Collection. Owen soon became engaged to Clift’s only daughter, Caroline whom he married in 1835. His primary task was to assist Clift in the preparation of the long-needed catalogue of John Hunter’s wide-ranging collection, which had been purchased for the College of Surgeons and served as the nucleus of the College’s Museum. Since most of Hunter’s notes concerning the specimens had been lost, Owen was obliged to perform many fresh dissections in order to identify the specimens. His general assistance to Clift included serving as Georges Cuvier’s guide around the Museum in 1830. This encounter led to an invitation to visit Cuvier in Paris, which Owen did the following year. He later considered the experiences of that trip and the contact with Cuvier a major influence on his work. In 1836 Owen was appointed Hunterian professor at the Royal College of Surgeons, an appointment that necessitated his presenting annually a course of twenty-four lectures based on some aspect of the Hunterian Collection.

Owen succeeded Clift as conservator of the Museum and continued in that position until his appointment in 1856 as superintendent of the natural history departments of the British Museum. At that time these departments were still housed with all the other departments of the British Museum in Bloomsbury. In 1859 Owen sent a forceful report to the trustees of the Museum detailing his views and plans for a new building in a separate location to house the natural history departments. There was much talk and little action, until Gladstone took an interest in Owen’s scheme and introduced a bill into Parliament. Finally, in 1871 work was begun on the new Natural History Museum in South Kensington, with the galleries laid out after the design Owen had submitted in 1859. Owen continued as superintendent of the Natural History Museum until after it was fully installed in the new building. He retired in 1884 and was then made K.C.B. After leaving the Royal College of Surgeons, Owen was free to accept the Fullerian lectureship in physiology at the Royal Institution. He also lectured at the Royal School of Mines and on many natural history topics in London and throughout Great Britain. During his career he received most major awards in his fields, including both the Royal and Copley medals from the Royal Society; he was also a member of many British and foreign scientific societies. He served on several royal commissions that dealt with aspects of public health and was president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1858. After a lengthy decline in his health, he died on 18 December 1892 at Sheen Lodge (in Richmond Park), the use of which Queen Victoria had granted him in 1851.

Unfortunately Owen is principally remembered as T. H. Huxley’s antagonist at the 1860 meeting of the British Association and in the ensuing debates over Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. This view neglects his authorship of massive quantities of detailed monographs and papers, which made known many new organisms (both recent and fossil), helped to delineate several natural groups, and laid the bases for much later work by many investigators. The attention of the scientific community was first focused on Owen in 1832 when he published Memoir on the Pearly Nautilus (Nautilus Pompilius, Linn.), which was based on a single specimen of this delicate organism that had previously been known only by its shell. In this superb piece of descriptive anatomy he also modified Cuvier’s Cephalopoda and proposed two orders that were considered valid until 1894. He reviewed the Cephalopoda in an 1836 article for Robert Todd’sCyclopaedia of Anatomy and Physiology. Among many other works on invertebrates, Owen in 1835 described the parasite that causes trichinosis.

In 1828 Owen began dissecting the animals that died in the gardens of the Zoological Society of London and soon after helped to organize the evening scientific meetings, the publication of which became Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London. Of all the exotic forms to which he thus had access probably none interested him more than the monotremes and marsupials . Before his work the means of generation and of feeding the young of these groups was very much a matter for discussion. Through specimens from the Zoological Society and the many specimens collected for him in Australia and New Zealand, Owen was able to establish in a series of papers both the mammalian nature and the egg-laying mode of reproduction of the monotremes. Similarly he was able to present details of the reproductive processes of the marsupials. This work was brought together in the articles “Monotremes” and “Marsupials” in Todd’s Cyclopaedia. Later in his career he was sent and described numerous fossil monotremes and marsupials, which further supported his argument that these forms compose two distinct groups within the Mammalia and that they have long been geographically isolated.

Primates in general and anthropoid apes in particular were of early and lasting interest to Owen, especially in their relation to man. He published many accounts of the anatomy of various primates from the aye-aye to the gorilla. In 1839 Owen began a series, “Contributions to the Natural History of the Anthropoid Apes,” which at first was concerned with the osteology of the orangutans but was broadened to include the other apes as specimens became available, often being sent to him by African explorers. Owen separated man from the, anthropoid apes into a separate subclass of Mammalia, the Archencephala, primarily on the basis of several supposed differences in the gross structure of their brains.

Lyell introduced Owen to Charles Darwin in October 1836, and thus began a long friendship. The following year Darwin turned over to Owen, for description, his South American fossils. Up to this time Owen had not published on any fossils but did have a broad knowledge of the anatomy, especially the osteology, of recent vertebrates. He described Darwin’s Toxodon platensis (1837), and his description of Drawing’s fossils from South America was published as the first volume of The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. “Beagle” (1840). The teeth of some of these fossils intrigued Owen and led him into a major study of the structure of teeth. He addressed a report to the British Association in 1838, which served as the nucleus of his Odontography (1840–1845) and his article, “Odontology,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica (1858). This work on teeth contained a great deal of new information and presented a uniform nomenclature for the teeth and their parts that was of considerable service to zoologists.

In addition to the monographs on comparative anatomy Owen, published several general works. Certain of his Hunterian lectures were published as separate volumes: on invertebrates (1843), on fishes (1844, 1846), and again on invertebrates (1855). Between 1866 and 1868 Owen published the massive On the Anatomy and Physiology of Vertebrates, the conclusion of which contains some of Owen’s views on Darwin’s hypothesis. All of these works were based on the prodigious amount of dissection and observation performed by Owen in preparing the five-volume Descriptive and Illustrative Catalogue of the Physiological Series of Comparative Anatomey of the Royal College of Surgeons’ Museum, of his nearly twenty courses of Hunterian lectures, and of his many research papers.

Owen’s paleontological work began in 1837 with Darwin’s South American fossils and especially with the monograph on the Toxodon that Owen recognized as an intermediate type, with anatomical characteristics normally identified with rodents, cetaceans, and pachyderms. His works on Darwin’s other fossils, for example, Glyptodon and Macrauchenia are no less important. Owen also published on the marsupial characteristics of a group of fossils from the Stonesfield Slate (1838) and the first part of his major Report on British Fossil Reptiles to the British Association (1839, part two in 1841). This two-part Report was the framework on which Owen developed his exhaustive four-volume History of British Fossil Reptiles (1849–1884), which is a separate publication of his collected papers issued principally by the Palaeontographical Society. Also in 1839 Owen received a fragment of a femur from New Zealand, which he identified as belonging to a previously unknown giant terrestrial bird. This first paper on the New Zealand moa developed into a major series of publications on Dinornis and similar flightless birds. In addition, Owen paid particular attention to fossils from South Africa and Australia, the latter in relation to his interest in marsupials, and published many new species and new descriptions of these faunae. Also of interest are his 1842 studies of English Triassic labyrinthodonts and his description of the Jurassic bird Archaeopteryx (1863).

Despite the quantity of Owen’s paleontological work before 1856, his career can be divided in two segments, not only by his place of employment but also by the different emphases of his work. While at the College of Surgeons the principal thrust of his work, and also of that museum,’s collections, was comparative-anatomical. After his transfer to the British Museum with its rich collections of fossils, which Owen further enriched, he naturally changed the emphasis of his work to paleontology. One aspect of this changed emphasis was his series of lecture courses on paleontology at the Royal School of Mines beginning in 1857; they were well-received and later compiled in his popular text paleontology (1860).

Owen made a number of contributions to taxonomy, often modifying and clarifying one or another taxon in the course of his anatomical investigations and in describing many previously unknown species and genera. An excellent example of this work is his recognition of the marsupials as a natural, geographically defined group. Owen did undertake a classification of the Mammalia, in his Rede lecture in May 1859, in which he gave primal import to certain characteristics of the cerebral hemispheres. By these criteria he divided the Mammalia into four subclasses of equivalent value: Lyencephala, Lissencephala, Gyrencephala, and Archencephala (in order of increasing complexity). A strength of Owen’s classification was the close association of the monotremes and marsupials in his Lyencephala. The other three subclasses graded imperceptibly into one another. The Archencephala, moreover, contained just one species, man. Owen believed that his cerebral criteria—anterior and posterior extension of the cerebral hemispheres, the posterior horn of the lateral ventricle, and the presence of a hippocampus minor—separated man further from the anthropoid apes than the latter were separated from the most primitive primates.

Owen’s views on the transmutation of species are not entirely clear, partly on account of his writing style. In 1848 he claimed to have no idea of what the secondary causes may have been by which the Creator introduced new species, and he refrained from publishing on the subject. He did think that there were six possible ways in which the Creator might have acted but would not enumerate them. This, of course, was soon after the publication of Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a much talked-about book. He had no objection to the notion that the Creator may have worked through secondary causes and recognized that, among animals, there had been an ascent and progression. Owen responded very vigorously to Darwin’s Origin in a long, anonymous attack in the Edinburgh Review for April 1860. He was totally unable to accept the possibility that selective action of external circumstances might cause new species to aris. He observed that no effects of any of the hypothetical transmuting influences had been recorded. His objections were not to evolution’s having occurred but rather that Darwin’s mechanism, natural selection, had not been demonstrated as adequate. He thought “an innate tendency to deviate from parental type” the most probable way that secondary causes have produced one species from another (On the Anatomy and Physiology of the Vertebrates, III, p. 807).

The basic ideas Owen put forth in his Rede lecture had been presented previously in London meetings, one of which T. H. Huxley attended. Huxley doubted the validity of Owen’s subclass Archencephala, investigated the matter to his own satisfaction, and incorporated his opposing findings in his teaching without publishing them. When Owen repeated his views in a discussion following another’s paper at the 1860 meeting of the British Association in Oxford, Huxley was prepared to contradict Owen directly and publicly, stating that he would give evidence to support his contradiction in a more appropriate place. This Huxley did, with the assistance of others, particularly Flower, in a series of publications from 1860 to 1863. Owen simply failed to see certain anatomical structures and relationships. He appears to have operated on the assumption that man possessed unique mental capabilities and that any such unique capabilities must be based in some unique anatomical structure or structures; therefore man could be distinguished from the anthropoid apes by just such structures. Not to be ignored is the fact that many considered Owen to be the preeminent anatomist of his time, and he had held two prominent positions in the British scientific community. In contrast, Darwin had not held any similar position and had already retired, seemingly, to the country; and Huxley, who had backed the argumentative Owen into a corner, was a relative youngster in 1860. These personal factors must have played a role in this whole controversy.

Owen’s comparative-anatomical and paleontological work is in the best Cuvierian tradition and perhaps comparable only to that of Cuvier. At the same time Owen was guided by a strong affinity to that school of thought which strongly repelled Cuvier—German Naturphilosophie. This affinity is amply evidenced by Owen’s further development of the idea of a vertebral archetype, promulgated by Goethe and Carus, in his On the Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton (1848), his Anatomy of Fishes (1846), and On the Nature of Limbs (1849). It was hardly coincidence that Owen was instrumental in having Oken’s Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie translated and published in London in 1847. Also, Owen wrote the article “Oken” for the eighth edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Through his elaboration of his theory of archetypes, Owen provided a major assist to the much-needed standardization of anatomical nomenclature and greatly clarified the distinction between the anatomical concepts of homology and analogy. In addition, from the Naturphilosophen Owen acquired the notion of a specific character resulting from the interaction of two opposing forces working within the developing embryo. His view that one species might develop from another by “an innate tendency to deviate from the parental type” meshes well with the developmental forces he saw operative in each individual

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works There are more than 600 titles in Owen’s bibliography. The greatest bulk of his papers are in the collections of the British Museum (Natural History). These include correspondence, notebooks, drafts of papers, and interleaved copies of most of his own books. The Royal College of Surgeons has a smaller but important collection of Owen’s papers, mostly dating from the period when he was there. In addition, letters by Owen are to be found in the papers of his many correspondents.

The most important of Owen’s separate publications include Memoir on the Pearly Nautilus (Nautilus Pompilius, Linn.) (London, 1832); Descriptive and Illustrative Catalogue of the Physiological Series of Comparative Anatomy, 5 vols. (London, 1833–1840); Fossil Mammalia, pt.1 of The Zoology of the Voyage of H. M. S. “Beagle” (London, 1840); Odontography; or a Treatise on the Comparative Anatomy of the Teeth; Their Physiological Relations, Mode of Development, and Microscopic Structure in the Vertebrate Animals (London, 1840–1845); On the Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton (London, 1848); On the Classification and Geographical Distribution of the Mammalia, Being the Lecture on Sir Robert Rede’s Foundation (London, 1859); Palaeontology, or a Systematic Summary of Extinct Animals and Their Geological Relations (Edinburgh, 1860; 2nd ed., Edinburgh, 1861); and On the Anatomy and Physiology of Vertebrates, 3 vols. (London, 1866–1868). The Life of Sir Richard Owen, cited below, contains an exhaustive chronological bibliography of about 650 items; this is the most complete listing of his works.

II. Secondary Literature The most important source for Owen’s life and work is by his grandson, Rev. Richard Owen, The Life of Sir Richard Owen (London, 1894), which contains an essay by Thomas Henry Huxley, “Owen’s Position in the History of Anatomical Science,” II, 273–332, and the bibliography cited above, II, 333–382. See also William Henry Flower, “Richard Owen,” in Dictionary of National Biography, XIV (1894–1895), 1329–1338

Wesley C. Williams