On the extent and aims of a national museum of natural history : including the substances of a discourse on that subject, delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, on the evening of Friday, April 26, 1861 / by Professor Owen.

Date:
1862
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the extent and aims of a national museum of natural history : including the substances of a discourse on that subject, delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, on the evening of Friday, April 26, 1861 / by Professor Owen. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    aims and grasp of mind, exercised his influence to obtain the erection of a special gallery for the osteology of whales in the Jardin des Plantes; and this alone, had he created no other treasure- houses of the wealth of living Nature, would necessitate a visit to Paris by every genuine culti- vator of Zoology. The descriptions of the speci- mens which Cuvier was thus enabled to receive and conveniently arrange, form a very vahiable part of his great and original work.* He visited, moreover, every metropolis where a single illustra- tion of the larger whales existed, which he had not been able to procure for Paris. His first journey to London, after the restoration of peace in 1815, included as a prime object, the study of the then unique skull of the Great Greenland Mysticete whale.f This specimen, rendered classical by the description and figures of the founder of Palaeon- tology, still remains of necessity in a dark base- ment vault of the British Museum. John Hunter * ' Recherclies sur les Ossemens Fossiles.' t La tete de Baleine dc Greenland du Museum Britaunique, is described in p. 281, and figured in pi. 226, figs. 9-11, in tlie 8tli volume of the 8vo. edition of tlie ' Ossemens Fossiles.'