Bloomsbury; but on this point he had no very decided personal opinion, and, yielding to that of the majority of men of science, he advocated by lecture, by conversation, and in print, the removal of the collections of natural history to a new and distant site. For this scheme he fortunately secured the powerful advocacy of Mr Gladstone, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, who moved (May 12, 1862) for leave to bring in a Bill to effect it. These excellent intentions were thwarted by Mr Disraeli, who, knowing no more about science than he did about primroses, saw only a chance of obstructing a political opponent; and once more the scheme was adjourned. The adjournment, however, was of short duration, for in 1863 Parliament voted the purchase of five acres at South Kensington, which Owen presently persuaded the Government to increase to eight; but further delays, extending over nearly twenty years, ensued, and when Owen resigned in 1883 the collections were not yet completely arranged in their new home. The Museum as completed is widely different from that which Owen originally prescribed. The gallery of ethnology is gone; the Cetacea are relegated, as at Bloomsbury in former days, to a cellar; there is no lecture-theatre; and, in fact, the index-museum is almost the only special feature which has survived, but even this was not arranged by himself. On one vital question of arrangement, moreover, Owen allowed his own views to be overruled. So early as 1842 he had reported to the Council of the College of Surgeons on the expediency of combining the fossil and recent osteological specimens, pointing out that ‘the peculiarities of the extinct mastodon, for example, cannot be understood without a comparison with the analogous parts of the elephant and tapir; nor those of the ichthyosaurus without reference to the skeletons of crocodiles and fishes. The proper position of such specimens in the Museum is, therefore, between those series of skeletons of which they present transitional or intermediate structures.’ An arrangement of the recent and fossil collections in accordance with these most reasonable and philosophical views appears in all the versions of the plan until the last; now it has entirely disappeared, and the two collections are disposed in opposite wings of the building widely severed from each other. Owen had no special turn for organization, and he was probably in a minority of one against his colleagues on this point. Besides this, his fighting days were over, and he preferred peace to an ideal arrangement of which his contemporaries could not see the advantages. Owen turned his enforced leisure at the British Museum to good account, and proceeded, with renewed activity, to occupy himself in various directions. In 1857 he gave lectures on paleontology at the Royal School of Mines, and his first course seems to have evoked the enthusiasm of his earlier days. Said Sir Roderick Murchison: