Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 23.djvu/119

Rh  rank among the very poorest. Young men are now warned by their friends to avoid the highest class of brain-work, and even to shun the learned professions, "because they do not pay." I meet with books containing the records of original research, yet for which the author has received less than the wages of a stone-breaker for the time employed. I meet with inventions which ruin the inventor and enrich his followers. Verily the manual laborer has scant cause to envy the brain-worker.—Journal of Science.



ROFESSOR OWEN'S especial field of labor, that of comparative anatomy, covers every portion of the realm of zoõlogy; and in that field, as one of his biographers well observes, he has published original papers on every branch of the animal kingdom, living and fossil. Another writer, reviewing his work, has said felicitously and justly that, "from the sponge to man, he has thrown light on every subject he has touched."

Richard Owen was born in Lancaster, England, July 20, 1804. He received an elementary education at the grammar-school of his native town, and was for some time a pupil of a surgeon in that place. He became a student of the University of Edinburgh in 1824, and there enjoyed the guidance of the third Monro, Alison, Jameson, and Hope, in the university, and of Barclay in the out-door school. He was one of the founders of the Hunterian Society, and was chosen president of it in 1825. He visited Paris in the same year, and made the acquaintance of Baron Cuvier. Having spent about a year in the study of medicine at Edinburgh, he went to London, and became a student in the medical school of St. Bartholomew's Hospital, where he received the diploma of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1826. He had intended to enter the navy, but had settled down to practice in London, when Dr. Abernethy, with whom he had been associated for a little time at St. Bartholomew's as one of the dissectors, procured for him a position as assistant to Dr. Clift, Curator of the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. In this position it was his duty to make the catalogue of the Hunterian collection; and he prepared catalogues of the "Pathological Specimens," "Monsters and Malformations," and, chiefly, of the "Specimens of Natural History in Spirits," in 1830 and 1831. He continued the study of these collections through many years, succeeding Clift as curator of the museum on his death, and was gradually led by them to the extensive field of research with which his name is connected. In order to identify the specimens, it was necessary to make new dissections; and these were constantly opening new paths of inquiry and leading to new discoveries. He 