The Museum as completed is widely different from that which Owen originally prescribed. The gallery of ethnology is gone; the Cetacea are relegated, as at Bloomsbury in former days, to a cellar; there is no lecture-theatre; and, in fact, the index-museum is almost the only special feature which has survived, but even this was not arranged by himself. On one vital question of arrangement, moreover, Owen allowed his own views to be overruled. So early as 1842 he had reported to the Council of the College of Surgeons on the expediency of combining the fossil and recent osteological specimens, pointing out that
‘the peculiarities of the extinct mastodon, for example, cannot be understood without a comparison with the analogous parts of the elephant and tapir; nor those of the ichthyosaurus without reference to the skeletons of crocodiles and fishes. The proper position of such specimens in the Museum is, therefore, between those series of skeletons of which they present transitional or intermediate structures.’
An arrangement of the recent and fossil collections in accordance with these most reasonable and philosophical views appears in all the versions of the plan until the last; now it has entirely disappeared, and the two collections are disposed in opposite wings of the building widely severed from each other. Owen had no special turn for organization, and he was probably in a minority of one against his colleagues on this point. Besides this, his fighting days were over, and he preferred peace to an ideal arrangement of which his contemporaries could not see the advantages.
Owen turned his enforced leisure at the British Museum to good account, and proceeded, with renewed activity, to occupy himself in various directions. In 1857 he gave lectures on paleontology at the Royal School of Mines, and his first course seems to have evoked the enthusiasm of his earlier days. Said Sir Roderick Murchison:
‘I never heard so thoroughly eloquent a lecture as that of yesterday.... It is the first time I have had the pleasure of seeing our British Cuvier in his true place, and not the less delighted to listen to his fervid and convincing defence of the principle laid down by his great precursor. Everyone was charmed, and he will have done more (as I felt convinced) to render our institution favourably known than by any other possible method’ (ii. 61).