he had shown vast groups of animals to be allied to one another.
Owen's palæontological work is of the highest order; and in work like his fossil mammals, birds, and reptiles, he excelled. The most characteristic of his faculties was a powerful scientific imagination. As the author wrote in one of his books, "the imagination is, after all, the most precious faculty with which a scientist can be equipped. It is a risky possession, it is true, for it leads him astray a hundred times for once that it conducts him to truth; but without it he has no chance at all of getting at the meaning of the facts he has learned or discovered." Professor H. E. Armstrong says: "It is justifiable to say that imagination plays an important part in chemistry; and that if too rigidly and narrowly interpreted, facts may become very misleading factors."
Fragments of bone which might be meaningless to less alert observers enabled Owen to divine the structure and present the images of whole groups of extinct animals—in this respect he was a disciple of Cuvier; and Cuvier was Owen's model. Cuvier could not accept the doctrine of homology, or the likeness of corresponding organs in animals as regards structure and type, as, e.g., between the foreleg of a quadruped, the wing of a bird, and the arm of a man, which are of kindred origin, but modified through long and lateral descent for the work which they do. The influence of Cuvier's ideas on Owen was manifest through
