Richard Owen: Victorian naturalist

Among the visitors who throng the British Museum of Natural History, to stand in awe before its spectacular displays, or marvel at its architecture, few give a thought to Richard Owen, the man who inspired the establishment of the greatest Victorian "cathedral of science". Some will notice Owen's statue and perhaps wonder what it is doing there. For surely this noble building must have been a tribute to Charles Darwin, whose statue, also on view, everyone recognizes! As historians of science know, after his death Owen came to be largely excluded from the halls of fame as a result of the successful "push" of the Darwinian party led by Thomas Henry Huxley. It was only in the 1960s, starting with the work of Roy MacLeod, that Owen attracted serious historical scrutiny. Owen's relative neglect suggests that historians of science, who like to inveigh against Whiggery when perpetrated by scientist/historians, can themselves be Whiggish, according to the amount of attention they devote to their subjects-as deemed "winners" or "losers" by posterity. However, in Nicolaas Rupke's text, Owen, a "loser" in the eyes of the twentieth century, receives at last a major intellectual biography. It has been long overdue. With his diverse cultural background, Rupke is admirably qualified to serve as Owen's biographer. Of Dutch origin, with full command of English and German (and as far as I know French), and with extended periods of residence in Britain and Australia, Rupke has been able to capture major themes in British social history of science in the nineteenth century; analyse the influence-real or imagined--of Continental transcendentalism on Owen's thinking; and recognize the important role of materials sent to Owen for examination from the southern hemisphere and other parts of the globe. To map the terrain of the British scientific community in the early Victorian period, Rupke uses the geological metaphor of a faultline, dividing Oxbridge functionalists from metropolitan transcendentalists. The comparison is admitted to be an oversimplification, but is useful none the less. Its line of strike is somewhat different from that of Adrian Desmond, who sees the principal division as running between the Oxbridge ruling establishment and medical radicals associated with the likes of Robert Grant. In support of his case, Rupke deftly shows how Owen succeeded in manoeuvring between the London medical community, the Oxbridge Paleyite tradition, the functionalism of Georges Cuvier, and eventually the transcendental anatomy emerging from Germany and France. All this intellectual and social/political effort ultimately found its physical embodiment in the establishment of a great museum as a major research site, where the results of comparative (transcendental/ archetypal, not Cuvierian/functional) anatomy could be displayed. For this purpose, the transcendental approach was particularly wellsuited. It was not necessary, from this perspective, to produce displays where animals were represented in their habitats, suitably adapted thereto: the skeletal "architecture" was necessary and sufficient. Through Rupke's analysis, certain canards about Owen are effectively destroyed. Owen was not a Platonist. He was not a biblical fundamentalist. He did have his own version of evolutionary theory (involving what Rupke, p. 250. calls a "combined orthogeneticmutational mechanism" with resort to "Lamarckian atrophy" in some instances). Owen was not thrashed in the famous "hippocampus minor" debate. (It was closer to a draw perhaps.) His theory of anatomical