Richard Owen was born at Lancaster, 20 July, 1804. His father was a West India merchant; his mother, Catherine Parrin, was descended from a French Huguenot family. She is said to have been a woman of refinement and intelligence, with great skill in music, a talent which she transmitted to her son. In appearance she was handsome and Spanish-looking, with dark eyes and hair. Owen delighted to dwell on his mother’s charm of manner, and all that he owed to her early training and example. We can well believe this, and the Life is full of touching references to her solicitude for her darling son. The interest she felt in all that he did even led her to read through his scientific papers and his catalogue of the Hunterian collection, with what profit to herself we are not informed. Her husband died in 1809; but the family seem to have been left in fairly affluent circumstances, and continued to live, as before, at Lancaster. Owen’s education began at the grammar-school there in 1810, when he was six years old, and ended in 1820, when he was apprenticed to a local surgeon. Of his schooldays but little record has been preserved. One of the masters described him as lazy and impudent; he is said to have had no fondness for study of any kind except heraldry; and his sister used to relate that as a boy he was ‘very small and slight, and exceedingly mischievous.’ Those who value the records of boyhood for the sake of traces of the tastes which made the man celebrated, will be rewarded by the perusal of the pages which record Owen’s four years as a surgeon’s apprentice at Lancaster. Not only will they find that he worked diligently at the curative side of his profession, but that, his master being surgeon to the gaol, he had the opportunity of attending post-mortem examinations, and so laid the foundation of his knowledge of the structure of the human frame. Here too we catch a glimpse of the future comparative anatomist; but the story of ‘The Negro’s Head,’ here given in the words used by Owen when he told it himself, is unfortunately too long for quotation, and is certainly far too good to be spoilt by abbreviation.