We have no wish to underrate Owen’s brilliant talents, or his perseverance, or his power of sustained work with a definite end in view; but at the same time it would be absurd to deny that he had good-fortune to thank for a large part of his first successes. What else made Abernethy, at their first interview, give him just the appointment best calculated to bring his peculiar gifts into the light of day? What else made the same patron procure his appointment, two years later, as assistant-conservator of the Hunterian collections, out of which all his future celebrity was developed? He might have been ‘exceedingly well informed in all that relates to his profession, an excellent anatomist, and sober and sedate very far beyond any young man I ever knew,’ as one who was in a position to know said of him in 1830, and yet have ‘bloomed unseen,’ an obscure practitioner in ‘the dusky purlieus of the law,’ had not the fickle goddess selected him as the special recipient of her favours. Owen’s active life in London divides itself naturally into two periods, each containing nearly thirty years. The first, during which he was connected with the Royal College of Surgeons, extended from 1827 to 1856; the second, during which he was nominally superintendent of the biological side of the British Museum, from 1856 to 1883. Those who would rightly understand his work during the former period must of necessity take into account the history and extent of the vast collection which he was expected to catalogue and to develop, for it dominated and directed all his studies. It was formed by the celebrated surgeon, John Hunter, between 1763 and 1793, in which year he died. In studying it, one is at a loss what to admire most—the beauty of the specimens themselves, and the admirable clearness with which those preserved in spirit have been dissected and mounted; or the labour and self-denial which brought them together in the midst of the incessant occupations of a large practice; or the almost prophetic instinct which divined what posterity would require in the way of such aids to study. It was Hunter’s object to illustrate the phenomena of life in all organisms, whether in health or in disease. For this purpose he collected as widely as he could. There is an osteological series, and a physiological series (in spirit), which exhibits the different organs, digestive, circulatory, and the like, in order, and traces their development from the simplest to the most complicated form. To the Invertebrata he had devoted special attention. He had secured, through his friend Sir Joseph Banks, many of the treasures collected during Cook’s voyages; and he had purchased rarities as occasion offered. Of insects he had a large collection. Nor were his observations limited to the animal kingdom. Whenever any physiological process could be illustrated by vegetable life, vegetables were pressed into the service. Nor did he fail to recognize the truth—which some persons still refuse