These lectures, more than anything that he wrote, made Owen famous, and procured for him a passport into society. To understand this, which appears almost a phenomenon at the present day, it must be remembered that the lecture-mania had not become one of the common diseases of humanity in 1836, and that it was still considered proper for great people to play the part of Mecenas to those who were distinguished in science or in letters. Hence, when the news spread abroad that a young and hitherto unknown lecturer was discoursing eloquently on a new subject in a building which few had heard of and none had seen, curiosity carried fashion into Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and certain dukes and earls, who cultivated a taste for natural history _dans leur moments perdus_, set the example of sitting at the feet of the new Gamaliel; more serious persons followed, and by-and-by a Hallam, a Carlyle, and a Wilberforce might be seen there side by side with the lights of medicine and surgery. To most men the work which these lectures, together with the catalogue, entailed, would have been sufficient. But Owen loved diversity of occupations; and one of his fortunate accidents presently threw an attractive paleontological subject in his way. It happened in this wise. Readers of the _Life of Charles Darwin_ will remember his disappointment, on his return home from the now classic voyage of the _Beagle_, to find that zoologists cared but little for his collections; that, in fact, Lyell and Owen were the only two who wished to possess any of his specimens. The latter, who had been introduced to him by the former, was not slow to grasp the scientific value of the extinct animals whose bones Darwin had dug with his own hands out of the fluviatile deposits of South America. He began with a huge skull—‘the head of an animal equalling in size the hippopotamus’—and described it before the Geological Society, in 1837, under the name of _Toxodon platensis_. Further, as Mr Huxley points out: ‘It is worthy of notice, that in the title of this memoir there follow, after the name of the species, the words “referable by its dentition to the Rodentia, but with affinities to the Pachydermata and the herbivorous Cetacea,” indicating the importance in the mind of the writer of the fact that, like Cuvier’s _Anoplotherium_ and _Paleotherium_, _Toxodon_ occupied a position between groups which, in existing Nature, are now widely separated’ (ii. 308). The same writer bids us remark that this ‘maiden essay in paleontology possesses great interest’ from another point of view, for ‘it is with reference to Owen’s report on _Toxodon_ that Darwin remarks in his _Journal_: “How wonderfully are the different orders, at the present time so well separated, blended together in different points in the structure of _Toxodon_.”’ Soon afterwards Owen described the rest of Darwin’s fossil specimens in the geological part of _The Zoology of the ‘Beagle’ Voyage_.