armadillo, seal, kangaroo, tapir, cercopithecus, crocodile, toucan, hornbill, pelican, flamingo, besides various Invertebrates. While Owen was preparing himself for his serious attack on the catalogue an event occurred which had an important influence on his scientific development. Cuvier came to England to collect materials for his work on fishes, and naturally visited the Hunterian collection. Owen has preserved a singularly modest account of his introduction to the great French naturalist: ‘In the year 1830 I made Cuvier’s personal acquaintance at the Museum of the College of Surgeons, and was specially deputed to show and explain to him such specimens as he wished to examine. There was no special merit in my being thus deputed, the fact being that I was the only person available who could speak French, and who had at the same time some knowledge of the specimens. Cuvier kindly invited me to visit the Jardin des Plantes in the following year’ (i. 49). Accordingly, Owen spent the month of August 1831 in Paris. It has been frequently stated, says his biographer, that Cuvier and his collection ‘made a great impression on Owen, and gave a direction to his after-studies of fossil remains,’ a position which he contests on the ground that neither Owen’s diary nor his letters describing the visit warrant such a conclusion. We do not attach much importance to this argument, but we feel certain that the Museum of the Jardin des Plantes, from its unfortunate subdivision into departments widely separated structurally from each other, could not have stimulated anybody in that particular direction. That Cuvier was, to a very large extent, Owen’s master in comparative anatomy is undeniable; he quotes him with respect, not to say with reverence, in almost every page of his writings, and the ‘Prix Cuvier’ adjudged to him in 1857 probably gave him more pleasure than all his other distinctions. Cuvier’s method, as set forth in _Les Ossemens Fossiles_, of illustrating and explaining extinct animals by comparison with recent was closely followed by his illustrious disciple. But this principle might easily have been learnt—and in our judgment was learnt—by a study of his works at home. On the other hand, Owen has stated, in unequivocal terms, the direction in which Cuvier did exert a special influence upon him. In his _Anatomy of Vertebrates_ (iii. 786), published in 1868, he says: ‘At the close of my studies at the Jardin des Plantes, Paris, in 1831, I returned strongly moved to lines of research bearing upon the then prevailing phases of thought on some general biological questions. ‘The great Master in whose dissecting-rooms, as well as in the public galleries of comparative anatomy, I was privileged to work, held that “species were not permanent”; and taught this great and fruitful truth, not doubtfully or hypothetically, but as a fact established inductively on a wide and well-laid basis of observation.’