Soon afterwards he was appointed (1859-61) Fullerian Professor of Physiology at the Royal Institution. Here again he chose ‘Fossil Mammals’ as his subject. In later years he gave frequent lectures on this and kindred subjects in the larger provincial towns. Nor must we omit the lectures to the Royal children at Buckingham Palace, which he delivered at the request of Prince Albert in 1860. These lectures, which were much appreciated by those for whom they were intended, laid the foundations of a close friendship between Owen and the Royal Family.
It must not, however, be supposed that these occupations diverted him from osteology. It was during this period that he wrote many of the paleontological memoirs to which we have already alluded. He continued to publish paper after paper on _Dinornis_ as fresh material accumulated; and he composed, among others, his monograph on the Aye-Aye (1863), which perhaps excited as much attention as that on the Nautilus thirty years before.
Between 1866 and 1868 he published his elaborate treatise _On the Anatomy of Vertebrates_, obviously intended to be the standard work on the subject for all time. But alas for the fallacies of hope! It is an immense store-house of information, founded in the main upon his own observations and dissections; and from no similar work will advanced students derive so much assistance. But, unfortunately, no revision of his own papers was attempted; the novel classification employed has never been accepted by any school of zoologists; and the only result of the proposed division of the Mammalia into four sub-classes, according to their cerebral characteristics, was a controversy from which Owen emerged with his reputation for scientific accuracy seriously impaired, if not irretrievably ruined. He had stated, not merely in the work of which we are speaking, but in others—as, for instance, in the Rede Lecture delivered at Cambridge in 1859—that certain divisions of the human brain were absent in the apes. It was proved over and over again, in public and private, that this assertion was contrary to fact, and contrary to his own authorities; but he could never be persuaded to retract, or even to modify, his statements.
