Essay reviews: Cataloguing for Empire

Abstract

Richard Owen, The Hunterian Lectures in Comparative Anatomy. May and June 1837 . Edited with an Introduction by Phillip Reid Sloan. Natural History Museum Publications, 1992. Pp. xii + 340, £37.50 hardback, £15.95 paper. ISBN 0-565-011065, 0-565-011448 Jacob W. Gruber and John C. Thackray, Richard Owen Commemoration: Three Studies . Historical Studies in the Life and Earth Sciences No. 1. Natural History Museum Publications, 1992. Pp. x + 181, £29.95. ISBN 0-565-01109 Over the last 10 to 15 years it has become increasingly clear that an astonishing proportion of Victorian natural history and comparative anatomy revolved around the enigmatic figure of Richard Owen - so much so that when the centenary of his death came around in 1992, the commemorations willingly spread themselves over several days and a great diversity of scientific themes. Owen’s life and work thoroughly embraced the industrious spirit of the nineteenth century. In his time he was renowned as Britain’s most gifted anatomist, as a public lecturer, a palaeontologist, taxonomist and philosopher on natural history topics, and, in another more concrete sense, as the man who brought the Natural History Museum in South Kensington into existence. He catalogued John Hunter’s collection while curator at the Royal College of Surgeons, dissected rare animals from the zoo, invented dinosaurs, classified a succession of gigantic fossil species from the outposts of empire, wrote memoirs on the pearly Nautilus, Australian marsupials, the Archaeopteryx , the aborigines of the Andaman Islands, the gorilla and the dodo, took an active role in London’s scientific society, received a shower of medals, including the Royal Medal in 1846 and the Copley in 1851, went to the opera, played chess with Edwin Landseer, visited the Queen at Osborne, and ended up with a knighthood and an attractive grace-and-favour residence in Richmond, known as Sheen Lodge. Yet in spite of being such a man of parts, Owen was not liked. Thomas Henry Huxley hated him and never ignored an opportunity to fight. Charles Darwin lost his temper over a review of the Origin of Species and never talked to him again. Antonio Panizzi did his best to prevent him splitting up the British Museum’s collections. It is one of the many achievements of these two books, published to coincide with the centenary, that Owen’s pugnacious, self-aggrandizing character and famous slipperiness under pressure emerge, not quite sanitized, but as the kind of ambitious qualities that were needed to get things done.