Lectures on the Elements of Comparative Anatomy
Lectures on the Elements of Comparative Anatomy

Author: Thomas Henry Huxley

Publisher:

Published: 1864

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13:

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"Contains, substantially, the lectures ... delivered, in the spring of 1863, at the Royal college of surgeons of England ..." Known primarily as the protagonist of evolution in the controversies immediately following the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species late in 1859, zoologist Huxley studied and wrote on a wide range of subjects, including education, philosophy, evolution and religion. "In 1863 he delivered a course of lectures at the College of Surgeons 'On the Classification of Animals, ' and another 'On the Vertebrate Skull'. The scrupulous care with which he endeavored to verify by actual observation every statement made in his lectures rendered the labor of preparation very great. Sir William Flower describes the way in which he would spend long evenings at the College of Surgeons, dissecting animals available among the stores, or making rapid notes and drawings, after a day's work in Jermyn Street. The consequences were twofold; the vivid impression of his own recent experience was communicated to his hearers, and the work of preparation became at once an incentive to further research and a means of pursuing it" (DNB).

The Hunterian Lectures in Comparative Anatomy, May and June 1837
The Hunterian Lectures in Comparative Anatomy, May and June 1837

Author: Richard Owen

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1992-08-15

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 9780226641898

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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.