However, I heard yesterday, upon what professed to be very good authority, that Owen would not leave the College under any circumstances.

It is astonishing with what an intense feeling of hatred Owen is regarded by the majority of his contemporaries, with Mantell as arch-hater.  The truth is, he is the superior of most, and does not conceal that he knows it, and it must be confessed that he does some very ill-natured tricks now and then.  A striking specimen of one is to be found in his article on Lyell in the last Quarterly, where he pillories poor Quekett—­a most inoffensive man and his own immediate subordinate—­in a manner not more remarkable for its severity than for its bad taste.  That review has done him much harm in the estimation of thinking men—­and curiously enough, since it was written, reptiles have been found in the old red sandstone, and insectivorous mammals in the Trias!  Owen is an able man, but to my mind not so great as he thinks himself.  He can only work in the concrete from bone to bone, in abstract reasoning he becomes lost—­witness “Parthenogenesis” which he told me he considered one of the best things he had done!

He has, however, been very civil to me, and I am as grateful as it is possible to be towards a man with whom I feel it necessary to be always on my guard.

Quite another being is the other leader of Zoological Science in this country—­I mean Edward Forbes, Paleontologist to the Geological Survey.  More especially a Zoologist and a Geologist than a Comparative Anatomist, he has more claims to the title of a Philosophic Naturalist than any man I know of in England.  A man of letters and an artist, he has not merged the man in the man of science—­he has sympathies for all, and an earnest, truth-seeking, thoroughly genial disposition which win for him your affection as well as your respect.  Forbes has more influence by his personal weight and example upon the rising generation of scientific naturalists than Owen will have if he write from now till Doomsday.

Personally I am greatly indebted to him (though the opinion I have just expressed is that of the world in general).  During my absence he superintended the publication of my paper, and from the moment of my arrival until now he has given me all the help one man can give another.  Why he should have done so I do not know, as when I left England I had only spoken to him once.

The rest of the naturalists stand far below these two in learning, originality, and grasp of mind.  Goodsir of Edinburgh should I suppose come next, but he can’t write intelligibly.  Darwin might be anything if he had good health.  Bell is a good man in all the senses of the word, but wants qualities 2 and 3.  Newport is a laborious man, but wants 1 and 3.  Grant and Rymer Jones—­arcades ambo—­have mistaken their vocation.

My old chief Richardson is a man of men, but troubles himself little with anything but detail zoology.  What think you of his getting married for the third time just before his last expedition?  I hardly know by which step he approved himself the bolder man.