It is much to be regretted that one who worked at his own subjects with such untiring zeal should have left behind him almost nothing to perpetuate his name with the great mass of the people. Mr Huxley remarks that, ‘whether we consider the quantity or the quality of the work done, or the wide range of his labours, I doubt if, in the long annals of anatomy, more is to be placed to the credit of any single worker’ (ii. 306); but he presently adds this caution: ‘Obvious as are the merits of Owen’s anatomical work to every expert, it is necessary to be an expert to discern them’ (ii. 332). He gave popular lectures, but they were not printed[123]; he wrote what he intended to be a work for all time, but it has faded out of recollection, and the whole theory of the archetype is now as dead as his own Dinornis. Nor was he at pains to surround himself with a circle of pupils who might have handed down the teaching of the Master to another generation, as Cuvier’s teaching was handed down by his pupils. It was one of Owen’s defects that he was repellent to younger men. In a word, he was secretive, impatient of interference, and preferred to be _aut Cæsar aut nullus_. Credit was to him worth nothing if it was to be divided. Again, brilliant as were his talents and assured as was his position, he could not recognize the truth that men may sometimes err, and that the greatest gain rather than lose by admitting it. During the whole of his long life we believe that he never owned to a mistake. Not only was what he said law, but what others ventured to say—especially if it ‘came between the wind and his nobility’—was to be brushed aside as of no moment. We believe that this feeling on his part explains his refusal to accept the Darwinian theory. As we have shown, he went half way with it, and then dropped it, because it had not been hammered on his own anvil. This unfortunate antagonism to other workers, coupled with his readiness to enter into controversy, and the acrimony and dexterity with which he handled his adversaries, naturally discouraged those who would otherwise have been only too happy to sit at the feet of the Nestor of English zoology; and during the last thirty years of his life he became gradually more and more isolated. Moreover, there was, or there was thought to be, a certain want of sincerity about him which no amount of external courtesy could wholly conceal. In a word, he was compact of strange contradictions. He had many noble qualities; and yet he could not truly be called great, for they were warped and overshadowed by many moral perversities. Had he lived in the previous century his portrait might have been sketched by Pope: