Owen, SIR RICHARD, one of the most eminent of zoologists, was born at Lancaster, July 20, 1804. From the grammar-school of that town he passed (1824) to Edinburgh University and extra-mural School of Medicine, and thence (1826) to St Bartholomew's Hospital in London, where he completed his course. He had barely started medical practice when he was called (1830) to help in cataloguing the Hunterian collections in the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, to the curatorship of which he afterwards succeeded. In 1835 he married the only daughter of Clift, his colleague in the museum. Till 1856 he continued to produce a marvellous series of descriptive catalogues, while for more than twenty years (1834-55) he lectured as professor of Comparative Anatomy, for two years at Bartholomew's, and afterwards as Sir Charles Bell's successor at the College of Surgeons. Some of the results of his research and teaching are embodied in several well-known volumes on comparative anatomy and physiology. Meanwhile he had helped to give new life to the Zoological Society of London, of which he was for a time the unpaid prosector, while he had also worked willingly in various public interests—e.g. as a commissioner of health (1843-46), and for the Great Exhibition of 1851. In 1856 he became superintendent of the natural history department of the British Museum, where he continued his investigations on living and fossil animals, energetic moreover in such practical matters as the fit housing of this magnificent collection. He also continued to teach periodically at the Royal Institution and elsewhere, until his resignation of official duties in 1883. But even thereafter the veteran of fourscore years and more has persisted at work. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1834, president of the British Association in 1857, Associate of the French Institute in 1859, a Companion of the Bath in 1873, a K.C.B. in 1883, recipient of many scientific medals, degrees, and honorary titles from many nations, he gained above all the immortality of a true worker.
As a student Owen had also visited Paris and seen Cuvier, of whose school he became a prominent disciple, yet in his theoretical conclusions he rather supported Geoffroy St-Hilaire, against whose principle of the unity of organic structure he had heard Cuvier argue in 1831 before the French Academy. Marvellous industry and width of knowledge, anatomical insight and enthusiasm for palaeontology, were as characteristic of Owen as of Cuvier, and their names will be linked while zoology lasts. Owen's anatomical and palaeontological researches number towards four hundred, and concern almost every class of animals from sponge to man; he helped to elucidate the structure of many rare and interesting types, such as the Venus-flower-basket (Euplectella), the Brachiopod Lingula, the King-crab (Limulus), the Pearly Nautilus and the Argonaut, the Mud-fish Protopterus, many extinct reptiles and birds, the recently-lost Moa and the persistent Apteryx, the Aye-Aye and the Gorilla; he greatly advanced morphological enquiry by his clear distinction between analogy and homology, as well as by his concrete studies on the nature of limbs, on the composition of the skull, and on other problems of vertebrate morphology; while his essay on Parenogenesis was a pioneer work of much historical importance in connection with theories of sex and reproduction. As a Pre-Darwinian, much influenced by the conception of 'archetypes,' Owen maintained a cautious, though by no means hostile, attitude to the more detailed evolutionist theories; his convictions, in short, are those of a Platonic anatomist. He died 18th December 1892. See the Life by his grandson (1894).