Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 23.djvu/120

 issued a "Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Physiological Series of Comparative Anatomy," in sections, from 1833 to 1840; the "Paleontological Catalogue," in 1845 and 1854; and the "Catalogue of Recent Osteology," in which he described 5,906 specimens, in 1854. The work of cataloguing and examining for the catalogues was accompanied with constant additions to the specimens and consequent growth of the collection till, in 1856, when Owen's connection with the work ceased, they filled ten times the space that had been sufficient for them in 1828.

An important corollary to these labors was the editorial work he performed upon the writings of Hunter, the illustrious founder of the collection. In 1837 he published a new edition of Hunter's "Animal Economy," to which he added all the known published papers of the author; and he gave, in the preface, the first descriptive narrative of Hunter's real discoveries. He afterward published two volumes of Hunter's "Essays and Observations on Natural History, Anatomy, etc.," which had been transcribed by Clift before Home destroyed the originals, and had been deposited by him, with an autographic authentication, in Owen's hands. The preface to this work embodied a showing of the advanced views which Hunter entertained in geology and paleontology.

In 1834 Dr. Owen was appointed to the newly-founded chair of Comparative Anatomy in St. Bartholomew's Hospital, and two years afterward was made the first Hunterian Professor in the Royal College of Surgeons. He filled this position for twenty years, after which, in 1856, he was appointed Superintendent of the Natural History Department of the British Museum.

The history of the whole of the earlier thirty years of Professor Owen's active life is illustrated by the records of his anatomical and zoological investigations. His earliest published paper was a demonstration of the manner in which an aneurism had been obliterated by Dr. Stevens, of Santa Cruz, by means of a ligature of the internal iliac artery, which was communicated to the Medical Society of St. Bartholomew's Hospital in 1830. Soon after becoming connected with the Hunterian Museum, he obtained a specimen of the Nautilus pompilius, or pearly nautilus, an animal then almost unknown, on which he published a memoir, with drawings by himself, foreshadowing the advanced views on structure and affinities which characterize his scientific system. In 1835 he published the first account of the Trichina spiralis, that remarkable nematoid worm of swine and men which has since become famous as a cause of disease.

Professor Owen's earliest communications to the Royal Society were papers on the generation of the ornithorhyncus and the kangaroo. In numerous later memoirs he discussed the structure and affinities of the higher quadrumana, and proposed the use of the brainstructure as an important element of classification. Between 1840 and