CHAPTER II
AS CONSERVATOR OF THE MUSEUM OF THE COLLEGE OF SURGEONS, AND HUNTERIAN PROFESSOR.
[1861-1884.]
The death, in 1861, of the eminent histological anatomist, Professor Quekett, rendered vacant the important post of Conservator of the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. This museum, it is almost superfluous to mention, was founded by the great anatomist, John Hunter, and is hence often known popularly, although not officially, as the Hunterian Museum.
“Originally a private collection,” observed Flower in his Presidential address to the Anatomical section of the International Medical Congress, held in London in the summer of 1881, “embracing a large variety of objects, it has been carried out and increased upon much the same plan as that designed by the founder, with modifications only to suit some of the requirements of advancing knowledge. The only portion of Hunter’s biological collection which have been actually parted with are the stuffed birds and beasts, which, with the sanction of the Trustees appointed by the Government to see that the college performs its part of the contract as custodians of the collection, were transferred to the British Museum, and a considerable number of dried vascular preparations, which having become useless in consequence of the deterioration in their condition, resulting from age and decay, have been replaced by others preserved by better methods.”
In regard to the special purposes served by this museum, it is mentioned in the same address that it is maintained by the College of Surgeons “for the benefit not only of its own members, but for that of the profession at large, and indeed of all who take any interest in biological science, whether the young student preparing for his examination, or the advanced worker who has here found materials for many an important contribution by which the boundaries of knowledge have been materially enlarged. To all such it is freely open without fee or charge. Even the written or personal introduction of members, still nominally required, is never asked for on the four open days from any intelligent or interested visitor; and on the one day of the week on which it is closed for cleaning, facilities are always given to those who are desirous of making special studies, and to the increasing number of lady students, whether artistic, scholastic, or medical. Artists continually resort to the museum to find opportunities of studying anatomy of man and animals, which no other place in London affords; and of late years it has been the means of a still wider diffusion of knowledge, by the visits which have been organised on summer Saturday afternoons by various associations of artizans, to whom a popular demonstration of its contents is usually given by the Conservator.”
Elsewhere in the same address we find the following passage in connection with the teaching functions of this body:—
“The various professorships and lectureships that are attached to the College have grown up chiefly in consequence of one of the conditions under which the Hunterian Collection was entrusted to it by Government—that a course of no less than twenty-four lectures shall be delivered annually by some member of the College upon Comparative Anatomy and other subjects, illustrated by the preparations.”
For some years previously to Professor Quekett’s death the offices of Conservator of the Museum of the College and of Hunterian Professor of Anatomy had been disassociated; the occupant of the professorial chair at the date in question being the late Professor T. H. Huxley, while, as already mentioned, Quekett held the Conservatorship. At an earlier date the two offices had, however, been held conjointly; Owen having fulfilled the duties of both for a period of no less than twenty-five years.
It may be added that, from the varied nature of the collections under his charge, the Conservator is expected to have a knowledge not only of comparative anatomy and zoology, but likewise of palæontology, physiology, surgery, and pathology.
Such a wide range of knowledge is possible to few men at the present day, but it was possessed to a very considerable extent by Mr. Flower, even at this comparatively early stage of his career; and as the appointment was congenial to his tastes, he applied for, and in due course was elected to, the Conservatorship. The acceptance of this involved the complete abandonment of practice as a surgeon—a course of action which, I believe, was never regretted. For eight years Mr. Flower discharged the duties of the Conservatorship to the satisfaction of the Council of the College; and when, in 1869, Professor Huxley found himself compelled by the pressure of other duties to relinquish the Hunterian chair, Flower was elected in 1870 to fill the vacancy. He thus, for the first time in his career, became entitled to the designation of “Professor,” and he continued to hold the two offices till his transference to the British Museum. Here it may perhaps be well to mention, in order to avoid confusion, that in the early part of Flower’s official career at the College of Surgeons the post of Articulator to the museum was held by a name-sake—Mr. James Flower.
For the first eight years of his connection with the museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields the time and attention of Flower were almost entirely devoted to the improvement, augmentation, and rearrangement of the collections under his charge; and even when his duties as Hunterian Professor claimed a large share of his time, no efforts were spared to maintain the former rate of progress in the museum.
To record in detail the improvements and alterations made in the museum under Flower’s able administration would obviously not only occupy a large amount of space but would, likewise, be wearisome to the reader. Attention will therefore be concentrated on a few salient features in connection with his work.
Although the anatomy of man naturally took a prominent place in what used to be called the “physiological” series, yet the preparations illustrating this subject were in the main restricted to the viscera; the details of regional anatomy and of the arrangement and distribution of muscles, vessels, and nerves not finding a place in the original scheme of the museum. This appeared to Flower to be a serious omission, and he soon set to work to exhibit human anatomy—largely on account of its paramount importance to the members of the medical profession—on a much more extensive scale than was previously the case, thereby affording by means of permanent preparations a ready demonstration, accessible at all times, of the structure of every part of the human frame. To those who have already learnt their anatomy, it has been well remarked, and who wish to refresh their memory, or verify a fact about which some passing doubt may be felt, or to those who are precluded by circumstances from visiting the dissecting room, the preparations of this series must prove of great value.
In connection with this series may be mentioned the fact that Flower published during the year he took office the work which heads the list of his numerous scientific contributions, namely, _Diagrams of the Nerves of the Human Body, exhibiting their Origin, Divisions and Connections_, which was favourably received by the medical profession. In the preparation of the anatomical series, Flower’s almost unrivalled powers of dissection stood him in good stead, and it was probably during this period of his career that he first acquired the rudiments of that originality and care in museum arrangement and display that led to his being called in after life by a German savant “the Prince of Museum Directors.”
Perhaps, however, the portion of the museum under his charge in which Flower was most deeply interested was that devoted to the dentition and osteology of the different orders of the Mammalia. As regards the osteological series, he expressed himself in the above-mentioned address of 1881 in the following words:—
“On this head we claim to be somewhat in advance of other museums, on account of the improvements which have been made of late years in preparing and articulating dried skeletons, and in displaying portions of the bony framework in an instructive manner. Formerly all the bones were rigidly fixed together, so that their articular surfaces, if not actually destroyed, were completely concealed, and no bone could possibly be removed and separately examined. The aim of a series of changes in the method of mounting skeletons introduced here, and now adopted, more or less completely, in many other museums, has been to obviate all these difficulties, and to make each bone, as far as possible, independent of all the rest, whilst preserving the general aspect and form of the entire skeleton.
“Another improvement in the osteological series introduced within the last twenty years has been the formation of a special collection designed to show the principal modifications of each individual skeleton throughout the vertebrate classes, by the placing the homologous bones of a number of different animals in juxtaposition. For convenience of comparison, the specimens of this series are all placed in corresponding positions, mounted on separate stands, and to each is attached a label bearing the name of the bone and the animal to which it belongs. This series is especially instructive to the students of elementary osteology, and forms an introduction to the general series.”
It might have been added with perfect truth that this series of the detached homologous bones of different animals is of equal value and importance to both the palæontologist and the evolutionist; since with its assistance the former has a ready means of ascertaining the nearest relationships of any fossil bone that may be brought under his notice, while the latter is able to observe the modifications that any particular bone has undergone in different groups of animals. He may notice, for instance, the elongation and slenderness distinctive of the humerus, or arm-bone, of the bat, and contrast it with the short and broad contour characterising the same bone in the mole, while he may observe the elongation of some of the bones of the hind-limbs distinctive of jumping mammals, and their almost total disappearance in the whales and dolphins. If the preparation of this series of specimens (which appears to have been closely connected with his lectures on the osteology of the Mammalia, and their subsequent incorporation in the well-known volume noticed in the sequel) had been the sole limit of the work accomplished by Flower, it would still have been sufficient to entitle him to the gratitude of posterity.
It was while engaged in the development of the collections of this museum that Flower made his important observations on the homologies and mode of succession of the teeth of various groups of mammals, and more especially the marsupials. Here, too, it was that he undertook the investigations which led to his publication of a new scheme of classification for the Carnivora; and it was likewise during his Conservatorship that he published his valuable series of observations upon the comparative anatomy of the mammalian liver. These and other kindred subjects may, however, better be considered at greater length in a later chapter. It must suffice therefore, to add in this connection that during Flower’s term of office the unrivalled series of human skeletons and skulls underwent a very marked and important increase.
By no means the least important part of Flower’s work in connection with the museum of the College of Surgeons was the compilation and publication of the first two volumes of the _Catalogue of Osteological Specimens_ the first, dealing with man alone, issued in 1879, and the second, written with the aid of his assistant, Dr. J. G. Garson, and treating of the other members of the mammalian class, in 1884. The importance of these works consists in the fact of their being a very great deal more than mere catalogues of the contents of one particular museum. They are, on the contrary, systematic treatises, embodying the views of their chief author on such important subjects as zoological nomenclature and classification, and on the best method of arranging museums which include specimens of the dentition and osteology of both living and extinct animals. They accordingly deserve notice at some considerable length, not only on this account, but as forming a record of the great changes Flower introduced into the museum at this period under his charge.
It appears that the first printed list of the contents of the museum was published in the year 1831. In a few years, however, it became evident that a work of a more ambitious nature was required; and in January 1842, the then Conservator, Professor Owen, presented a report to the Council, on the supreme advantage to be gained by combining in the proposed new Catalogue both the recent and the fossil osteological Catalogues. Acting on this, the Committee of Council resolved that such a Catalogue should be prepared and published, and the duty of doing this was thereupon confided to Mr. Owen.
For some reason or other, this excellent and far-seeing resolution was not acted upon in its entirety; and although catalogues were in due course compiled by Owen and published, the specimens belonging to animals still extant were entered in volumes quite distinct from these devoted to fossil bones and teeth; while the two series of specimens were likewise kept apart in the museum itself. “Hence,” as Flower subsequently observed, “each series was incomplete, and required reference to the other for its perfect illustration and comprehension.” These defects were remedied during the administration of Flower, who not only arranged the extinct specimens in their proper position among those belonging to recent animals, but likewise followed the same admirable plan in drawing up the Catalogues. Later on, as we shall see in the sequel, he endeavoured to introduce the same scheme into the Natural History Museum, but was prevented by the force of circumstances from carrying his views into full effect, although a small step in the right direction was accomplished.
The first part of the Catalogue of the osteological specimens in the museum of the College which, as already said, is devoted to man alone, is a most laborious, accurate, and valuable work, dealing first with the general osteology of man, then with his dentition, and, thirdly, with the special characters of the osteology and dentition of the different races of the human species—a line of study which had formed the subject of several of his lectures as Hunterian Professor. Nor is this by any means all, for the introduction to this volume forms a valuable compendium of the principles and rules of the science of craniology; the remarks on the mode of measuring skulls, and the method of calculating from such measurements “indices,” whereby skulls of different types can be compared with one another with exactness, being models of accuracy and clearness, and rendered the more valuable from the tables by which they are accompanied. For measuring the cubic contents of skulls, Flower was convinced that mustard-seed formed the best and most accurate medium.
In addition to its value as a summary of the contents of that portion of the museum of which it treats, and as a _précis_ of its chief author’s views at that time as to the classification of mammals, the second part of the Catalogue is of special importance on account of containing an expression of opinion on the subject of zoological nomenclature—a subject on which Flower had previously spoken in no uncertain tones in his Presidential Address to the Zoological section of the British Association at the meeting held in Dublin in 1878, which is republished in _Essays on Museums_.
The keynote of Flower’s introduction to his Catalogue was the urgent need of uniformity of nomenclature among zoologists; and on this, and the subject generally, he expressed himself as follows:—
“As there is no matter of such great importance in a catalogue as the correct naming of the objects described in it, this part of the subject has engaged a very large share of attention in preparing the work. I am not sanguine enough to suppose that the names I have adopted—always after careful research and consideration—will in every case be deemed satisfactory by other zoologists, yet I hope that some advance will have been made towards that most desirable end—a fixed and generally recognised nomenclature of all the best-known species of mammals. Having selected the generic and specific name which I considered most appropriate, I have given the place and date of their first occurrence, but have only admitted such synonyms as have found their way into standard works, judging it better that the remainder should be buried in oblivion, or at all events only retained in professedly bibliographical treatises. In selecting the name chosen, I have been mainly guided by the views which have been gradually gaining general currency among conscientious naturalists of all nations, and which were formulated in what is commonly called the Stricklandian Code, adopted by a Committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1842, and revised and reprinted by the Association in 1865, and again in 1878.... The regulations laid down in these codes for the formation of new names are unimpeachable; and although some of the rules for the selection of names already in existence have given rise to criticism, and are occasionally difficult of practical application when an endeavour is made to enforce them too rapidly, they do in the main, when interpreted with discretion and common-sense, lead to satisfactory results. As what we are aiming at is simply convenience and general accord, and not abstract justice or truth, there are cases in which the rigid law of priority, even if it can be ascertained, requires qualification, as it is certainly not advisable to revive an obsolete or almost unknown name at the expense of one, which if not strictly legitimate, has been universally accepted and become thoroughly incorporated in zoological and anatomical literature; and it is often better to put up with a small error or inconvenience in an existing name than to incur the much larger confusion caused by the introduction of a new one.”
These are weighty words of wisdom, and it must be a matter for profound regret to all persons of thoroughly philosophical and well-balanced minds that, by the newer school of naturalists—led by an American section—they have not only been received without the attention they merit as coming from a man of Flower’s wide experience and mature judgment, but have been absolutely ignored and the principle they inculcate treated with disdain and contempt. Obscure names, frequently of the most barbarous construction and sound, have been raked up from all conceivable sources and substituted for the well-known terms adopted by Flower and many of his contemporaries; while, to make matters worse, the good old rule that no names antedating the twelfth edition of the _Systema Naturæ_ of Linnæus should be recognised in zoological literature has, so far as mammals are concerned, been treated absolutely as a dead letter.
If it be asked what has been the result of thus ignoring the deliberately expressed and matured views of a judicial mind like Flower’s, and whether we are perceptibly nearer the attainment of uniformity in the matter of biological nomenclature, the reply must be that the subject is in a more unsatisfactory state than ever, and the desired end as far off. It is perfectly true, indeed, that a section of the students of the systematic side of zoology have agreed among themselves to employ only such names as they believe to be the earliest, quite irrespective of the obscurity of their origin or the rule that such names should be compounded according to classic usage. When, however, we take a broader survey of the field of biology, we find that, almost to a man, the anatomists, the palæontologists, the geologists, the evolutionists, the students of geographical distribution, and other writers who discuss the subject from aspects other than the purely systematic, adhere to the more conservative side in respect of nomenclature. Moreover, even if this were not the case, we should be but little forwarder, seeing that in works like Darwin’s _Origin of Species_ and Wallace’s _Geographical Distribution of Mammals_—which must remain classical so long as zoology lasts as a science—the older style of nomenclature is used. Consequently, even if the proposed emendations and changes were universally adopted, the names employed by these and other contemporary writers would still have to be learnt and committed to memory by all zoological students; so that, instead of one series of names, as would have been practically the case had Flower’s proposal been loyally adopted by his contemporaries and followers, we are compelled to know and remember a double series.
Whether in the end there will not be a reversion to the judicial and temperate conservative compromise proposed by Flower—and almost everything in this world is based more or less upon compromise—from the headstrong and radical mode of procedure followed by some of the younger zoologists, remains to be seen.
Another subject on which Flower insisted very strongly in the work under consideration was the inadvisability of multiplying generic and family divisions in zoology. Here again we may quote his own words.
“I do not mean,” he writes, “that with the advancement of knowledge improvements cannot be continually made in the current arrangement of genera. The older groups become so unwieldy by the discovery of new species belonging to them that they must be broken up, if only for the sake of convenience; newly discovered forms which cannot be placed in any of the established genera must have new genera constituted for them, and fuller knowledge of the structure of an animal may necessitate its removal from one genus into another; all these are incidents in the legitimate progress of science. Such alterations should, however, never be made lightly and without a full sense of responsibility for the difficulties which may be occasioned by them, and which often can never be removed. Complete agreement upon this subject can never be expected, as the idea of a _genus_, of an assemblage of animals to which a common generic name may be attached, cannot be defined in words, and only exists in the imagination of the different persons making use of the expression; but there might be no difficulty in coming to some general agreement, if individual zoologists would look at the idea as held by the majority, and would not give way to the impulse to bestow a name wherever there is the slightest opening for doing so.”
Here, again, we have golden words, which are unfortunately ignored by a large number of the zoologists and palæontologists of the present day. Most noteworthy, perhaps, in the whole passage, is the emphasis given to the fact that generic groups are but arbitrary creations of the human, and that, far from being natural realities, they are solely and simply formed as matters of convenience, so that their limits are absolutely dependent upon individual or collective opinion.
Consequently, when we hear it said—as we may—that such and such an animal _must_ constitute a genus by itself, we may be assured that in nine cases out of ten the speaker is talking nonsense. It _may_ do so, but this is purely as a matter of convenience for purposes of classification. As examples of Flower’s broad and far-seeing way of looking at the limits of generic groups, we may take his inclusion of the foxes in the same group as the wolves, of the polecats and weasels with the martens, of the two-horned with the one-horned rhinoceroses, and of the blackbirds with the thrushes; and yet in all these instances, as in many others, a large number of his successors—many of whom cannot lay claim to anything approaching his intellectual capacity and his power of separating essentials from trivialities—cannot be content with the grand simplicity of his scheme of classification. What they gain by their involved systems and minute subdivisions is best known to themselves—to the public such complexity tends to render zoology, which ought to be one of the most attractive and delightful of all sciences (and it was one of Flower’s endeavours to make it as much so as possible), repulsive and distasteful.
The present writer’s opportunities of intercourse with Professor Flower during his tenure of the Conservatorship of the Museum of the College of Surgeons were but few and intermittent, and restricted to the latter part of that time, he may therefore be pardoned for quoting from a biographer who appears to have enjoyed more favourable opportunities in this respect. Before doing so, however, the writer cannot refrain from putting it on record that his own appointment to the Geological Survey of India in the early seventies was largely due to the influence of Professor Flower, who had been his examiner in the Natural Science Tripos at Cambridge, in December 1871.
To revert to the subject of Flower’s personality in connection with his appointment in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, his biographer in the “Year-Book” of the Royal Society for 1901 writes as follows:—
“His tenure of office, viz., twenty-two years, as Conservator of the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, was a splendid record of original and laborious work, of great administrative capacity, and of unvarying courtesy to visitors. The museum was most popular under his management. There, amidst the almost unrivalled collections, the tall, fair-haired, and earnest worker was daily to be found, minutely studying, comparing and measuring, or giving directions for the extension, arrangement, and classification of the varied and valuable contents. From a scientific point of view no post could have been better adapted to the man or the man to the post. With many and varied lines of study lying conveniently around him, in the quietude of an office less conspicuous and exacting than the British Museum, in the full vigour of manhood, and in the midst of sympathetic seniors, friends, and assistants, it can well be imagined that Sir William’s powers attained great development, and that perhaps he never felt so full of happiness and satisfaction with his original work. It could not well be otherwise. His conscientious devotion to duty, his remarkable skill in devising methods of mounting, his artistic eye, his tact with subordinates, and the esteem in which he was held by zoologists and comparative anatomists at home and abroad, give a clue to his subsequent career, and show the training of one of the most accomplished and courtly comparative anatomists our country has produced.”
But there was another side to Flower’s work during the greater part of his official connection with the Royal College of Surgeons, and one which brought him into wider and closer contact with the public than was the case with his Conservatorship. This was the delivery of the lectures which form the chief, if not the sole, duty of the Hunterian Professor. According to the statutes of the College, the annual course of lectures, which is short, must be on a different subject each year, but must in all cases be illustrated by preparations in the museum.
The present writer was privileged to attend only one of these courses—on the general structure of the Mammalia—and is therefore not competent to speak from experience of these lectures as a whole. Nevertheless the one course was amply sufficient to convince him of the lecturer’s special qualifications for his task. Flower was indeed an ideal lecturer, endowed with a fine presence, a suave and yet penetrating voice, great power of expression, a slow and impressive delivery, and, above all, an absolute mastery of his subject (whatever it might be) down to the minutest and apparently most insignificant details. For him, every detail of structure, whether functional or rudimentary, had a significance and a meaning, and he would never rest satisfied till he had found out what that meaning was, and had laid the whole of the evidence on which he based his conclusions before his audience. That audience, which generally included a considerable number of the elder members of the medical profession, as well as many well-known zoologists and anatomists, invariably listened with rapt attention to the story told so admirably by the accomplished lecturer.
Of these lectures, the first course, delivered in 1870 on the Osteology of the Mammalia, is perhaps the one which has rendered Flower most widely known among zoological students, since, as noticed below, it became the basis of a valuable little volume.
His introductory lecture in February 1870 was largely devoted to the subject of plan, or “type,” in Nature, and to the evidence in favour of the transmutation of species and evolution of organised beings—a doctrine which was at that time by no means so widely accepted, even among scientific men, as it is at the present day. In this address the lecturer prefaced his remarks by explaining that since the main part of his anatomical knowledge was derived from the splendid series of specimens and preparations in the museum under his charge, so he intended to act as the mouth-piece of the specimens themselves. After this introductory lecture followed the regular course for the year, which was devoted to the Osteology of the Mammalia, and it is perhaps this series which has rendered the name of Flower most familiar to the ordinary students of scientific zoology and comparative anatomy, since it was published during the same year as a volume in Macmillan’s _Manuals for Students_, under the title of _An Introduction to the Osteology of the Mammalia: being the Substance of a Course of Lectures delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons of England_. Such was the success of this admirable little volume—which has ever since formed the recognised text-book on the subject of which it treats, that a second edition was called for in 1876, and a third in 1885. In expanding and revising the latter—in which, by the way, the second half of the original title was dropped—the author, owing to the pressure of official duties, called in the assistance of Dr. J. G. Garson, of Cambridge, a well-known zoologist and anatomist.
This book, to be properly appreciated, should be studied in connection with the series of homologous bones of different species of mammals arranged by Flower himself in the museum of the College of Surgeons, to which reference has been made in an earlier part of this chapter, and from which most of the illustrations were drawn. The figures of the dog’s skull have been reproduced in a large number of zoological and anatomical works. The plan followed in this volume forms an admirable model for all works of a kindred nature. In the first chapter the author discusses the classification of the mammalia; in the second he describes the skeleton of that group as a whole; while in the remainder the modifications presented by the various bones in the different groups are described in considerable detail. A special feature is the sparing use of technical terms, and the careful explanation of the meaning of those of which the use was unavoidable. Besides being carefully revised and brought up to date, the third edition differed from its predecessors by including a table of the number of vertebræ found in a large series of species.
In the following year (1871) the Hunterian course, which comprised no less than eighteen lectures, was devoted to the functions and modifications of the teeth of mammals, from man to the monotremes, although it was not known at that time that either of the two generic representatives of the latter group really possessed true teeth, the discovery of these organs in the Australian duckbill not having been made till many years later.
Among other subjects included in his Hunterian lectures was the anatomy and affinities of the Cetacea, or whales and dolphins, a group of mammals in which Flower almost from the first displayed a marked and special interest, and on which he became one of the first authorities. Since, however, this is a subject to which fuller reference is made in a later chapter, it need not be further discussed in this place.
In 1872 Flower’s Hunterian lectures were devoted to the subject of the digestive organs of mammals; these lectures being reported, with illustrations, in the _Medical Times and Gazette_ of the same year.
Perhaps the most important and certainly the most voluminous of these lectures was the series on the “Comparative Anatomy of Man,” which extended over several years, the course for 1880 dealing especially with the skulls of the Fiji, Tongan, and Samoan islanders. The subject of anthropology, or the study of the different races of mankind from a zoological standpoint, shared indeed with that of the Cetacea a large part of the Professor’s attention, and the two together formed, perhaps, his favourite lines of investigation. In regard to the problems presented by the human race when viewed from this standpoint, Flower has expressed himself as follows:—
“Comparative anatomy is specially occupied in studying the differences between one man and another, estimating and classifying their differences, and especially discriminating between such differences as are only individual variations (variations which, when extreme, are relegated to the department of the teratologist) and those that are inherited, and so become characters of different groups and races of the human species. Physical anthropology, moreover, extends its range beyond merely comparing and registering these differences of structure. It also occupies itself with endeavouring to trace their cause, and the circumstances which may occasion their modifications. It endeavours also to form a classification of the different groups of mankind, and so to throw light upon the history and development of the human species.”
The races towards which special attention was directed in these lectures were mainly those inhabiting the islands of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, namely, the diminutive and degraded Andamanese, the Australians, and their near but very distinct neighbours, the Tasmanians, long since extinct, the Melanesians or Oceanic Negroes, and the Polynesians. With the exception of the latter, which the Professor regarded as an aberrant and somewhat mixed modification of the Malay stock, all these different island races were considered to belong to the black or negroid branch of the human species; and it was suggested that the Andamanese were the purest living representatives of a great “Negrito” stock, which had been formerly widely distributed, and had given rise to the true African negroes on the one hand, and to the Oceanic negroes on the other. As regards his view that the aboriginal Australians are members of the negroid branch, it will be pointed out in a later chapter that an alternative opinion has of late years gained considerable favour among anthropologists.
The Hunterian lectures of Flower were, however, by no means restricted to the negro-like races of the islands of the southern oceans. On the contrary, the Professor devoted much attention in the course of the series to the various races to be met with in our Indian dependencies, dwelling especially on the so-called Dravidian (_i.e._ non-Aryan) tribes of the Nilgiris and other districts of southern India, and likewise on the still more remarkable and primitive Veddas of Ceylon. The Mongols, as typified by the Tatars and Chinese, and their relationship on the one hand to the Eskimo, and thus with the “Indians” of America, and on the other with the Malays, were also discussed at considerable length in these lectures.
The origin of the Egyptians was also a subject to which much attention was devoted by the Hunterian Professor. “The much vexed questions,” he said, “who were the Egyptians? and where did they come from? receive no answer from anatomical investigations, beyond the very simple one that they are one of several races which inhabit all the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea; that they there lived in their own land far beyond all periods of time measured by historical events, and that in all probability it was there that they gradually developed that marvellous civilisation which has exercised such a powerful influence over the arts, the sciences, and the religion of the whole western world.” The truth of these suggestions has been fully confirmed by the subsequent researches of Professor Flinders Petrie.
As a whole, these Hunterian lectures on anthropological subjects were a great success, and won for the Professor increased respect and admiration from scientific men of all classes. They paved the way for the preparation of that invaluable Catalogue of the anthropological specimens in the museum of the College to which allusion has already been made.
When in 1884 Professor Flower, on the resignation of Sir Richard Owen, accepted the Directorship of the Natural History Departments of the British Museum, and was thus compelled to sever his official connection with the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, after a service of two-and-twenty years, the following resolution, on the motion of Sir James Paget, seconded by Mr. Erichsen, was unanimously passed by the Council of the College:—
“That the Council hereby desire to express to Mr. William Henry Flower their deep regret at his resignation of the office of Conservator. That they thank him for the admirable care, judgment and zeal, with which for twenty-two years he has fulfilled the various and responsible duties of those offices. That they are glad to acknowledge that the great increase of the museum during those years has been very largely due to his exertions, and to the influence which he has exercised, not only on all who have worked with him, but amongst all who have been desirous to promote the progress of Anatomical Science. That they know that while he has increased the value and utility of the museum by enlarging it, by preserving it in perfect order, and by facilitating the study of its contents, he has also maintained the scientific reputation of the College, by the numerous works which have gained for him a distinguished position amongst the naturalists and biologists of the present time. And that, in their placing on record their high appreciation of Mr. Flower, the Council feel sure that they are expressing the opinion of all the Fellows and Members of the College, and that they all will unite with them in wishing him complete success and happiness in the important office to which he has been elected.”
This is indeed a splendid, although by no means exaggerated, testimonial to the success of Flower’s administration of the Museum of the College of Surgeons, and to the good and lasting work he there effected—work which paved the way to the improvements he was subsequently able to effect in the Natural History Museum.
_Note._—On Owen’s retirement the post of Superintendent of the Natural History Departments of the British Museum, which he had filled, was merged into the new office of Director; a wider scope being given to the duties of the post.