‘placed its author, at a bound, in the first rank of monographers. There is nothing better in the _Mémoires sur les Mollusques_, I would even venture to say nothing so good, were it not that Owen had Cuvier’s great work for a model; certainly, in the sixty years that have elapsed since the publication of this remarkable monograph it has not been excelled’ (ii. 306).
This essay seems to have given Owen a taste for the group to which the nautilus belongs. At the conclusion of the _Memoir_ he proposed a new arrangement of it, now generally accepted, which includes the fossil as well as the recent forms; and, as occasion presented itself, he described other species and genera. The merit of a memoir on the fossil group called ‘belemnites,’ from the Oxford Clay, was the cause assigned for the award to him of the gold medal of the Royal Society in 1846.
Between 1833 and 1840 the long-desired catalogue, in five quarto volumes, made its appearance. Sir William Flower calls it ‘monumental’; a singularly happy epithet, for it commemorates, as a monument should do, alike the founder of the Museum and the industrious anatomist who had minutely described the four thousand specimens of which the ‘physiological series’—or, as we should now say, the series of organs—then consisted. Nor, though the arrangement is obsolete, can the work itself be regarded as without value, even at the present time. It has already served as a model for the catalogues of many other museums, and has taken its place in the literature of the subject. It is, in fact, an elaborate treatise on comparative anatomy from the point of view of the modifications of special organs. The thirteen years spent over it can hardly appear an excessively long time when we remember the work involved, and also the fact that the college had from the first recognized the duty of filling up gaps in the collection as occasion offered. Many of the specimens recorded in this catalogue had been prepared by Owen himself.
During the years that Owen spent upon the catalogue his position at the College of Surgeons was gradually becoming assured. He had begun as assistant-curator at £120 a year, but with no prospects, as the place of curator was expected to be given to Mr Clift’s son on his father’s retirement. But in 1832 the younger Clift died suddenly from the effects of an accident, and Owen remained as sole assistant at £200. In July 1833 his salary was raised to £300, and in 1835 he was enabled to marry Caroline Clift, Mr Clift’s only daughter. From this time until 1852, when the Queen gave him the delightful cottage at Sheen which he lived in till his death, he had apartments within the building of the College of Surgeons. They were small, and inconvenient in many ways. Owen was in the habit of turning his study into a dissecting-room, and his wife’s diary contains many amusing references to the pervading odours caused by the examination of a rhinoceros or an elephant, or to such disturbances as the following: ‘Great trampling and rushing upstairs past our bedroom door. Asked Richard if the men were dancing the polka on the stairs. He said, “No; what you hear is the body being carried upstairs. They are dissecting for fellowship to-day!”’ But, on the other hand, the proximity to the library and the museum, which he could enter at any hour of the night or day, must have greatly helped one who worked so incessantly. Ultimately, in 1842, Owen became sole curator, with Mr Quekett as his assistant. This was, no doubt, a dignified position, but it had its drawbacks. Owen’s golden time at the college was the period between 1827 and 1842, when the business details were taken off his hands by the painstaking and methodical Clift. After 1842 he was held responsible, as curators usually are, for much that he regarded as irksome routine. This he performed in a perfunctory fashion that did not please the Council, and difficulties arose between that body and their distinguished servant which time only rendered more acute. It may be that the Council were not sufficiently sensible of the honour reflected upon the college by possessing ‘the first anatomist of the age’; and Owen, on his side, may have been too fond of doing work which brought ‘grist to the mill,’ and applause, and troops of friends, without being directly connected with the college. However this may have been, it is beyond dispute that Owen’s removal, in 1856, to the British Museum, was a fortunate solution of a difficulty which otherwise would probably have ended in an explosion.