OWEN
1804–1892
"DOCTI non solum vivi atque præsentes studiosus dicendi erudiunt, atque docent; sed hoc etiam post mortem monimentis literarum assequuntur," wrote Cicero nearly two thousand years ago, and it is very true of Owen and others mentioned in the present volume.
At the time when Napoleon's invasion of England was completely organized, and only to be overthrown by the power of Nelson, there was born at Lancaster, on 20th July 1804, Richard Owen, destined to be the greatest comparative anatomist and palæontologist of the nineteenth century. Although an Englishman on his father's side, Owen's mother was of French extraction, belonging to a Huguenot family named Parrin, and at the age of six he went to the Lancaster Grammar School, but showed no signs during his schooldays of the bent of his future career. At the age of sixteen he was apprenticed to a surgeon and apothecary, and in 1824 proceeded to the Edinburgh University to study medicine; but the following year he came to London, where he joined the medical
75
