animals. His Comparative Anatomy and Physiology of Vertebrates (3 vols., London, 1866–1868) was indeed the result of more personal research than any similar work since Cuvier’s Leçons d’anatomie comparée. He not only studied existing forms, but also devoted great attention to the remains of extinct groups, and immediately followed Cuvier as a pioneer in vertebrate palaeontology. Early in his career he made exhaustive studies of teeth, both of existing and extinct animals, and published his profusely illustrated work on Odontography (1840–1845). He discovered and described the remarkably complex structure of the teeth of the extinct animals which he named Labyrinthodonts. Among his writings on fishes, his memoir on the African mud-fish, which he named Protopterus, laid the foundations for the recognition of the Dipnoi by Johannes Müller. He also pointed out later the serial connexion between the teleostean and ganoid fishes, grouping them in one sub-class, the Teleostomi. Most of his work on reptiles related to the skeletons of extinct forms, and his chief memoirs on British specimens were reprinted in a connected series in his History of British Fossil Reptiles (4 vols., London, 1849–1884). He published the first important general account of the great group of Mesozoic land-reptiles, to which he gave the now familiar name of Dinosauria. He also first recognized the curious early Mesozoic land-reptiles, with affinities both to amphibians and mammals, which he termed Anomodontia. Most of these were obtained from South Africa, beginning in 1845 (Dicynodon), and eventually furnished materials for his Catalogue of the Fossil Reptilia of South Africa, issued by the British Museum in 1876. Among his writings on birds, his classical memoir on the Apteryx (1840–1846), a long series of papers on the extinct Dinornithidae of New Zealand, other memoirs on Aptornis, Notornis, the dodo, and the great auk, may be specially mentioned. His monograph on Archaeopteryx (1863), the long-tailed, toothed bird from the Bavarian lithographic stone, is also an epoch-making work. With regard to living mammals, the more striking of Owen’s contributions relate to the monotremes, marsupials, and the anthropoid apes. He was also the first to recognize and name the two natural groups of typical Ungulata, the odd-toed (Perissodactyla) and the even-toed (Artiodactyla), while describing some fossil remains in 1848. Most of his writings on mammals, however, deal with extinct forms, to which his attention seems to have been first directed by the remarkable fossils collected by Darwin in South America. Toxodon, from the pampas, was then described, and gave the earliest clear evidence of an extinct generalized hoof animal, a “pachyderm with affinities to the Rodentia, Edentata, and Herbivorous Cetacea.” Owen’s interest in South American extinct mammals then led to the recognition of the giant armadillo, which he named Glyptodon (1839), and to classic memoirs on the giant ground-sloths, Mylodon (1842) and Megatherium (1860), besides other important contributions. At the same time Sir Thomas Mitchell’s discovery of fossil bones in New South Wales provided material for the first of Owen’s long series of papers on the extinct mammals of Australia, which were eventually reprinted in book-form in 1877. He discovered Diprotodon and Thylacoleo, besides extinct kangaroos and wombats of gigantic size. While occupied with so much material from abroad, Owen was also busily collecting facts for an exhaustive work on similar fossils from the British Isles, and in 1844–1846 he published his History of British Fossil Mammals and Birds, which was followed by many later memoirs, notably his Monograph of the Fossil Mammalia of the Mesozoic Formations (Palaeont. Soc, 1871). One of his latest publications was a little work entitled Antiquity of Man as deduced from the Discovery of a Human Skeleton during Excavations of the Docks at Tilbury (London, 1884).
Owen’s detailed memoirs and descriptions require laborious attention in reading, on account of their nomenclature and ambiguous modes of expression; and the circumstance that very little of his terminology has found universal favour causes them to be more generally neglected than they otherwise would be. At the same time it must be remembered that he was a pioneer in concise anatomical nomenclature; and, so far at least as the vertebrate skeleton is concerned, his terms were based on a carefully reasoned philosophical scheme, which first clearly distinguished between the now familiar phenomena of “analogy” and “homology”. Owen’s theory of the Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton (1848), subsequently illustrated also by his little work On the Nature of Limbs (1849), regarded the vertebrate frame as consisting of a series of fundamentally identical segments, each modified according to its position and functions. Much of it was fanciful, and failed when tested by the facts of embryology, which Owen systematically ignored throughout his work. However, though an imperfect and distorted view of certain great truths, it possessed a distinct value at the time of its conception. To the discussion of the deeper problems of biological philosophy he made scarcely any direct and definite contributions. His generalities rarely extended beyond strict comparative anatomy, the phenomena of adaptation to function, and the facts of geographical or geological distribution. His lecture on “virgin reproduction” or parthenogenesis, however, published in 1849, contained the essence of the theory of the germ-plasm elaborated later by August Weismann; and he made several vague statements concerning the geological succession of genera and species of animals and their possible derivation one from another. He referred especially to the changes exhibited by the successive forerunners of the crocodiles (1884) and horses (1868); but it has never become clear how much of the modern doctrines of organic evolution he admitted. He contented himself with the bare remark that “the inductive demonstration of the nature and mode of operation” of the laws governing life would “henceforth be the great aim of the philosophical naturalist.”
See The Life of Richard Owen, by his grandson, Rev. Richard Owen (2 vols., London, 1894). (A. S. Wo.)
OWEN, ROBERT (1771–1858), English social reformer, was
born at Newtown, Montgomeryshire, in North Wales, on the
14th of May 1771. His father had a small business in Newtown
as saddler and ironmonger, and there young Owen received all
his school education, which terminated at the age of nine. After
serving in a draper’s shop for some years he settled in Manchester.
His success was very rapid. When only nineteen years of age
he became manager of a cotton mill in which five hundred people
were employed, and by his administrative intelligence and energy
soon made it one of the best establishments of the kind in Great
Britain. In this factory Owen used the first bags of American
sea-island cotton ever imported into the country; it was the
first sea-island cotton from the Southern States. Owen also made
remarkable improvement in the quality of the cotton spun;
and indeed there is no reason to doubt that at this early age he
was the first cotton-spinner in England, a position entirely due
to his own capacity and knowledge of the trade. In 1794 or
1795 he became manager and one of the partners of the Chorlton
Twist Company at Manchester. During a visit to Glasgow he
had fallen in love with the daughter of the proprietor of the
New Lanark mills, David Dale. Owen induced his partners
to purchase New Lanark; and after his marriage with Miss Dale
he settled there, as manager and part owner of the mills (1800).
Encouraged by his great success in the management of cotton
factories in Manchester, he had already formed the intention of
conducting New Lanark on higher principles than the current
commercial ones.
The factory of New Lanark had been started in 1784 by Dale and Arkwright, the water-power afforded by the falls of the Clyde being the great attraction. Connected with the mills were about two thousand people, five hundred of whom were children, brought, most of them, at the age of five or six from the poorhouses and charities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. The children especially had been well treated by Dale, but the general condition of the people was very unsatisfactory. Many of them were the lowest of the population, the respectable country people refusing to submit to the long hours and demoralizing drudgery of the factories; theft, drunkenness, and other vices were common; education and sanitation were alike neglected; most families
