In the mid-1850s, no scientist in the British Empire was more visible than Richard Owen. Mentioned in the same breath as Isaac Newton and championed as Britain’s answer to France’s Georges Cuvier and Germany’s Alexander von Humboldt, Owen was, as the Times declared in 1856, the most “distinguished man of science in the country.” But, a century and a half later, Owen remains largely obscured by the shadow of the most famous Victorian naturalist of all, Charles Darwin. Publicly marginalized by his contemporaries for his critique of natural selection, Owen suffered personal attacks that undermined his credibility long after his name faded from history. With this innovative biography, Nicolaas A. Rupke resuscitates Owen’s reputation. Arguing that Owen should no longer be judged by the evolution dispute that figured in only a minor part of his work, Rupke stresses context, emphasizing the importance of places and practices in the production and reception of scientific knowledge. Dovetailing with the recent resurgence of interest in Owen’s life and work, Rupke’s book brings the forgotten naturalist back into the canon of the history of science and demonstrates how much biology existed with, and without, Darwin

Sir Richard Owen (1804-1892), comparative anatomist, colleague and later antagonist of Darwin, and head of the British Museum of Natural History, was a major figure in Victorian science. Yet historians of science have found Owen a difficult subject, in part because he chose not to expound his views in a major theoretical work but rather presented them through annual lectures at the Royal College of Surgeons from 1837 to 1856. Nevertheless, Owen's views on the nature of life, the relations of form and function, the meaning of fossils, and the development of species gave his contemporaries such as Lyell, Grant, Huxley, Whewell, and Darwin a set of positions with which they could agree or disagree while developing their own views. Now, for the first time, modern readers how access to the opening series of Owen's Hunterian Lectures, in which he set out the larger framework of the theoretical reflections that occupied him during the next nineteen years. Presented to the public in the two months before Darwin began his first notebook on the species question, these lectures reveal the nature of the synthesis of French, German, and British biology taking place in metropolitan London in this crucial period in nineteenth-century life science. Phillip Reid Sloan has transcribed and edited the seven surviving lectures and has written an introduction and commentary situating the work in the context of Owen's life and the scientific and intellectual life of the time. Sloan pays particular attention to Owen's early relations to the German scientific and philosophical tradition, and in this respect contributes to an understanding of the relations between science and British Romanticism. In the lectures, Owen surveys the history of comparative anatomy up to his time and develops his views on the nature of life, species duration, physiological function, and the relation between embryology and classification. One can see the degree to which transcendental anatomy and the views of Von Baer, Johannes Müller, E. G. St.-Hilaire, and Cuvier were current in London in the late 1830s. -- from back cover.

This four-volume catalogue, published 1848-54, provides an extensive list of the zoological and geological literature available at the time.