quote pages of Milton, Shakespeare, and other standard writers. He was also an ardent novel-reader. Mrs Owen kept him well supplied with the novels of the day; and he sat up half the night over _Eugene Aram_, the serial stories of Dickens, _Vanity Fair_, _Shirley_, and _The Mill on the Floss_, which we are glad to find he preferred to all the rest of George Eliot’s stories. Apart from his social proclivities, he managed to get acquainted with most of the celebrated people of the day. They either came to see him and the museum he directed, or they asked him to call on them. Among those whom he met in this way we may mention Mrs Fry, Miss Edgeworth, Turner, Samuel Warren, Emerson, Guizot, the younger Dumas, Fanny Kemble, Tennyson, Macaulay, and Carlyle, who described him as ‘the man with the glittering eyes,’ and decided that he was ‘neither a fool nor a humbug.’ In his own especial line of science he was intimate with Lord Enniskillen, Sir Philip Egerton, Prince Lucien Bonaparte, Sedgwick, Murchison, Lyell; and subsequently took a keen interest in the researches of Livingstone, whom he helped with the first record of his African work. ‘Poor Livingstone!’ he says; ‘he does not know what it is to write a book.’ When Owen could find time for a holiday, which was but seldom, he enjoyed fishing and grouse-shooting; but his delight in Nature was so keen that probably sport was what he least valued in these excursions. It was natural that, as Owen’s reputation grew, he should be involved in some of the schemes for improving the condition of the people which from time to time engaged the attention of Government. In 1843 he served on a commission of inquiry into the health of towns, and exercised himself over sewers, slaughter-houses, and such-like abominations. In 1846 he was on the Metropolitan Sewers Commission, which grew out of the former, and he did much good work in hunting up evidence about the spread of cholera and typhus from imperfect drainage. In the course of this he incurred considerable unpopularity, and was contemptuously nick-named ‘Jack of all Trades.’ The work became so heavy and absorbing that he thought of resigning; but when Lord Morpeth urged him to remain, on the ground that they could ill spare his ‘enlightened philanthropy,’ he not only withdrew his resignation, but consented to serve on a commission to consider the state of Smithfield Market and the meat supply of London (1849), a subject on which he held very decided opinions. Probably his zoological qualifications, coupled with his knowledge of what had been effected on the Continent in the way of establishing extramural slaughter-houses, had much to do with abolishing the market. He was also on the Preliminary Committee of Organization for the Great Exhibition of 1851, and chairman of the jury on raw materials, alimentary substances, &c. Similar services were performed by him for the exhibition held at Paris in 1855.