There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam
Richard Owen, ‘the English Cuvier’, was in his prime. At his home town of Lancaster, a celebration was arranged in his honour in September 1842. ‘We walked in procession to the Town Hall, Mr Whewell, the Mayor, the MP for the town and myself … cheered by all the humbler folks … We sat down to a most princely banquet … on three raised state-seats at the head.’ Metamorphosed from the once humble apprentice working in the local gaol, Owen had become indistinguishable from the gentry.
At the Royal College of Surgeons he was promoted to joint-Conservator with Clift, sharing responsibility for the Hunterian Museum with his former master. He undertook a major research project on ‘Fossil Mammalia’ for the British Association, completed his ‘Odontography’ on vertebrate teeth and was planning a summary of ‘British Fossil Reptiles’. Caroline, and their only son William, bore his dedication to his work with scarcely a complaint, apart from the odd occasion when the smell from preserved animals in their home became too much. ‘The presence of an elephant’s brain on the premises made me keep all the windows open, especially as the weather is very mild,’ Caroline noted once when an elephant had died at the Zoological Society. ‘I got R to smoke cigars all round the house.’
Soon after creating the ‘dinosaurs’, Owen became still more famous when a remarkable prediction he had made came true. In 1839, he had been presented with a curious six-inch shaft of bone from an unknown creature from New Zealand. Observing the honeycomb matrix of the bone and its hollow structure, he had reasoned that this was from the limb of a bird, but because of its size, he had deduced that the bird was large and unable to fly. With great insight, he declared that a great flightless bird must once have existed.
Four years later, a missionary in New Zealand sent a hamper of fossils to Professor Buckland. It contained bones from a large flightless bird, exactly as predicted by Owen. ‘Every word comes true to the letter,’ Justice Broderip enthused to Buckland. ‘This is another proof of the powers of our great physiological friend.’ The giant feathered monster, which could attain a height of twelve feet, became known as a moa or Dinornis.
Owen’s brilliant prediction was brought to the attention of Prince Albert. Buckland described the occasion to Owen: ‘Sir Robert Peel and his Royal guest were astounded at the height of the Dinornis, “the very height of this library,”’ Sir Robert had declared. Prince Albert wanted to see the moa bones for himself. ‘No work of Owen’s created so much excitement’, according to one report. ‘Society, headed by Prince Albert, hurried to inspect the huge remains … and to be introduced to the fortunate necromancer, at whose bidding a phantom procession of strange creatures had suddenly stepped out of the past, into the present.’
Owen’s studies on the moa highlighted an intriguing observation. The flightless birds, such as the giant moa or the small, wingless kiwi, were found in New Zealand. South America was inhabited by mammals that were very different from any from anywhere else, both in the past, such as the extinct Megatherium, and in the present, with the related sloth and armadillo. Australia proved to be yet another distinct province, with extinct marsupials such as the Diprotodon and the present-day kangaroo and wombat. ‘With extinct, as with existing Mammalia,’ Owen wrote, ‘particular forms were assigned to particular provinces.’
This made nonsense of the notion that all animals dispersed from one centre at Noah’s Ark, and highlighted the puzzle of the origin of species. The distribution strongly suggested that animals in the different ‘provinces’ had originated separately. So were there different centres of Creation?
With these thoughts in mind, Owen’s reaction to a sensational book published the next year was muted. In Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, the anonymous author set out evidence from the fossil record for the progression of life from simple to complex forms, showing the possibility of evolution without the hand of God. ‘The simplest and most primitive type … gave birth to the type next above it,’ he wrote, ‘and so on to the very highest.’ Although the author could not define the law governing development, he was in no doubt that such a law existed as surely as the law of gravitation. The shocking implication, spelled out in terms the layman could understand, was that Man himself could be the pinnacle of evolution and was not specially created by God.
Such was his anxiety at publishing this view explicitly that the author, a journalist, Robert Chambers, went to enormous lengths to conceal his identity. Among leaders of science there was outrage, even horror. According to the Reverend Sedgwick at Cambridge, ‘the seductions of the author … poison the springs of joyous thought … he has annulled all distinction between physical and moral … in the new jargon of a degrading materialism’. If the book is true, said Sedgwick, ‘religion is a lie; human law is a mass of folly; morality is moonshine; and man and woman are only better beasts’. It was essential to scotch the ‘serpent coils of false philosophy’. Friends turned to Owen to write a damning review. ‘A real man in armour is required,’ Murchison urged his colleague.
But Owen was curiously reticent. During these years he was formulating his own ideas to account for the progression of the fossil record. Through studies on vertebrate anatomy he aimed to understand ‘homologies’, or ‘equivalent parts’, in the different animal groups. The foreleg of a lizard, the flipper of a seal, the wing of a bird and the arm of man were all homologous structures, connected to comparable parts of the body. Owen immersed himself in the vertebrate skeleton, seeking out more and more homologies. His aim was to identify the ‘Ideal Archetype’, the common design or ground plan which, he believed, formed a blueprint for all vertebrates.
The concept of a blueprint, or archetype, for all vertebrate life became very significant for Owen. He believed it was ‘the Divine idea’ in the mind of the Creator as Nature was brought into being. From the archetype, he reasoned, God could foresee every possible form of vertebrate life: ‘the Divine Mind which planned the Archetype, also foreknew all its modifications’. This, for Owen, proved that ‘the knowledge of such a being as Man must have existed before Man appeared’. In other words, Man was planned and foreseen by God, and was not the result of some materialistic process. However, he admitted, ‘to what secondary laws the orderly progression of such organic phenomena may have been committed, we are yet ignorant’.
His complex ideas, expressed very simply, could allow him to accept that there had been a progression of life over time, ‘from the first embodiment of the Vertebrate idea’ until Man himself, the pinnacle of Creation, came into existence. But the laws governing this progression were Divine laws, put in place by the Creator at the beginning. For Owen, God had not created each new species – He had created the laws which allowed them to form.
Owen’s theory, providing a skilled synthesis of different threads of evidence, was of prime importance for Victorian biology. He followed his hero, Cuvier, in believing that the animal kingdom fell into four major divisions that were quite distinct. Within each division, studies on homologies by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and others were extended into the concept of the ‘Ideal Archetype’, the plan in the Creator’s mind which allowed him to integrate natural history with the Christian faith. As propounder of such notions, Owen commanded enormous respect among his colleagues and leading figures of the day and was fast acquiring astonishing power for a scientist.
Exploiting his influential contacts, he aimed to expand his empire further. He wanted to unite all the collections of natural history in the British Museum, the Royal College and elsewhere under one roof, creating a national museum that would rival the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. At the very least, he hoped to combine the fossil collections at the British Museum with the specimens he supervised at the Royal College. As he told one of the British Museum trustees, ‘of all the Natural History departments in the museum, I believe this to be most out of place there’. Undoubtedly, he had his eye on Gideon Mantell’s collection. How much more fitting, Richard Owen reasoned, that all these splendid fossil collections should be combined with those under his care at the College of Surgeons, so as to best illustrate ‘the order and laws of Nature’.
Gideon Mantell, recovering slowly from his accident at home in Clapham, was acutely aware of Owen’s success. ‘I am still quite an invalid,’ he told Professor Silliman in April 1842; ‘I cannot stoop, or use any exertion without producing loss of sensation and power in my limbs.’ Over a period of nine months he consulted many leading physicians: Liston, Brodie, Bright, Lawrence, Stanley, Coulson and others. It was thought the tumour on his lower spine was pressing on nerves, causing the intense pain and occasional paralysis.
Confrontation with Owen was out of the question. Publicly, he would not attack Owen’s ‘unwarrantable conduct’; rather the reverse – he even applauded his ‘elaborate and masterly paper’. Privately, he confided to Professor Silliman, ‘I am too ill to care one straw about worldly reputation … My feelings are so subdued by illness that I am more than ever anxious to live in charity with all men; and shall pass over these matters, at least till a more suitable opportunity offers.’ The day of reckoning would have to be postponed.
Meanwhile, he struggled to maintain his Clapham practice but it became increasingly obvious that he would have to give up medicine to stand any hope of recovery. ‘I have submitted to my fate and am negotiating for a successor,’ he wrote in 1843. He could, however, still write while lying on the sofa, using a special desk he had made for his daughter Hannah, one that ‘I contrived for my sweet child’. Following the success of The Wonders of Geology, Mantell embarked on another book, Medals of Creation.
He entreated his wife to return to him, but she did not, moving instead to Exeter with her housekeeper, Hannah Brooks. Apart from Reginald, his youngest son who was at college studying engineering, Mantell heard little from his children. He supported their travels but felt their absence keenly. Months passed without hearing from Walter. The lack of letters was noted in his diary: ‘it is six months since I heard from Walter’, or ‘not heard from Walter since last September’. Occasionally, he caught news of his progress in the New Zealand Gazette.
The sense of isolation added to his suffering: ‘I am in a very precarious state,’ he confided to Professor Silliman, ‘but I feel grateful for the blessings that I still have within my reach … and I can still hope on to the end.’ His American friend never lost faith in him. ‘There is no correspondent out of my own family to whom I write so frequently and so long letters as to yourself,’ wrote Silliman, ‘because you tell me that they cheer you under your trials and I would cheerfully devote many hours in the year to that object.’
The early 1840s also heralded a difficult time in the life of Mary Anning, whose discoveries had laid the foundations for Owen’s first report on the marine fossil reptiles. One local inhabitant, Nellie Waring, recorded her impressions of Mary Anning at this time: ‘her little shop was scantily furnished and her own dress always of the very plainest. There was Mrs Anning, the Fossil woman’s mother too, a very old lady in a mob cap and large white apron, who sometimes came with feeble steps into the shop to help us in our selection … the two were devoted to one another.’
But Mary’s mother died in 1842. Soon after this, rumours began to spread that Mary had taken to drink. Gradually, it was realised that she was suffering from breast cancer; the most readily available pain relief was alcohol. Recollections of her at this stage contrast with the Mary Anning of earlier years. According to Nellie Waring, ‘she was very thin and had … large eyes which seemed to me to have a kindly consideration for her little customers’. She was ‘very timid, very unpretending and very patient … She would serve us with the sweetest temper … never finding us too troublesome as we turned over her trays of curiosities and concluded by spending a few pence only, and this we might do as often as we liked without causing offence.’
As news of Mary’s illness reached the members of the Geological Society in London, William Buckland again tried to raise a subscription for her. Buckland’s time was no longer concentrated on ‘undergroundology’. He had been appointed Dean of Westminster in 1845, one of the most powerful positions in the Anglican hierarchy. As Dean, Buckland gradually eased himself out of the front line of geological research and became more involved in administration, restoring the school and the Abbey and organising sanitary reforms. Although he successfully organised a fund for Mary Anning, there was little else he could do to help.
Increasingly confined within her shop, she remained devoted to science. In her commonplace book, she copied out articles on the planets and geology along with ‘Moral Maxims’ and the poems of Byron. She also wrote down prayers for morning and evening. These expressed modest aims for each day: she should try to greet each day with gratitude, give thanks to God for her past life and even thank Him for her days of illness. In the words of Henry de la Beche, ‘she bore with fortitude the progress of cancer on her breast, until she finally sank beneath its ravages on 9th March, 1847’.
She was buried in the Lyme churchyard by the sea, at the summit of the disintegrating Church Cliffs. At the Geological Society Henry de la Beche, now President, wrote a eulogy in her honour – most unusually, since she was not a Fellow. ‘I cannot close this notice of our losses by death,’ he said, ‘without adverting to that of one, who though not placed among even the easier classes of society, but who had to earn her daily bread by her labour, yet contributed by her talents and her untiring researches, in no small degree to our knowledge of the great Enalio-Saurians and other forms of gigantic life entombed in the vicinity of Lyme Regis.’
Fellows contributed funds for a stained-glass window in her honour at the parish church at Lyme, showing Mary tending to the poor and healing the sick. ‘This window is sacred to the memory of Mary Anning of this parish,’ reads the inscription, ‘in commemoration of her usefulness in furthering the science of geology, as also of her benevolence of heart and integrity of life.’ In the words of a report in Charles Dickens’s journal All the Year Round: ‘the carpenter’s daughter has won a name for herself, and deserved to win it’.
In 1846, Richard Owen’s reputation came under critical scrutiny at a moment when yet more honours were being bestowed on him. In November he was nominated for the Royal Society’s prestigious Royal Medal for his paper on the belemnite, the extinct mollusc distantly related to the squid and cuttlefish. Using his supporters at the Royal Society, Owen had arranged for Mantell’s 1841 study of Iguanodon to be refused consideration. Curiously, Owen himself was chairing the meeting at the Royal Society when his own paper on the belemnite was recommended for the award. However, this piece of work was not quite as original as it appeared. The little sea creature had already been described by an amateur, one Mr Chaning Pearce.
Chaning Pearce had come across the strange fossil during the building of the Great Western Railway. Its body was composed of fifty chambers, and had an ink sac and ten arms with pairs of hooks and suckers. In 1842, four years before Owen, Pearce’s findings had been read before the Geological Society and he had named the creature Belemnoteuthis. Owen had been present at the meeting and had heard all of Pearce’s observations.
When Owen addressed the Royal Society in November 1846, he made no reference to Chaning Pearce’s earlier work. Ignoring the previous study on the creature, he casually proposed a different name: Belemnites owenii. Unfortunately for Owen, this name was based on an erroneous assumption. He failed to realise, as Pearce had correctly observed, that the fossil creature belonged to a new and previously unrecognised genus which lacked an external solid ‘guard’, or shield, typical of a belemnite, but could be identified by a brown coating forming the outside surface.
Although Owen received the Royal Medal, his conduct in the affair did not go entirely unnoticed. Edward Charlesworth, the editor of the London Geological Journal, condemned his failure to acknowledge the earlier work of Pearce: ‘like cases are so common as to constitute an evil of no slight magnitude in the progress of scientific research’. But although Charlesworth continued to attack the Hunterian Professor, Owen had risen so far that he seemed almost immune to criticism. Now a frequent dinner guest at Drayton Manor, the home of Sir Robert Peel, he used his powerful position to appeal directly to the Prime Minister for a national museum of natural history. Such was his status in Victorian society that he was invited within a few months to discuss his plans at Downing Street.
While Owen had his eye ever more keenly fixed on uniting all the famous fossils under his supervision, Gideon Mantell had started a second collection of his own, in spite of being so incapacitated. ‘Although unable to walk but a short distance, my mind is generally vigorous,’ he wrote optimistically. His Clapham practice was dwindling and he could not find a successor, yet obstinately he still insisted on making geological excursions. The ‘Country of the Iguanodon’ and its exotic flora and fauna had become, in his mind, a ‘land of Promise’. Although, he wrote, ‘I must be content to have obtained a distant glimpse of this Promised Land’, he was still irresistibly drawn towards it and longed to complete his understanding of Iguanodon. ‘I am not without hope that a tooth or two may be found attached to a fragment of jaw and have promised a rich reward to my men if they find such a specimen.’
His daughter Ellen occasionally returned to help him, drawing illustrations for his books and accompanying him on outings. Medals of Creation, published in 1844, was a success, running to a second edition. At every opportunity, Mantell continued to make contacts with local collectors, seeking out more original fossils to describe. Once he went with Ellen as far as Heyford in Northamptonshire, the ancient seat of the Mantells – ‘Alas, now in the hands of strangers,’ he wrote. There seemed little hope of winning back the family seat and the honours that would have gone with it.
Then he began to receive fossils from an unexpected source. He had not seen his son Walter for eight years, since the day in September 1839 when he had departed for New Zealand. During 1845 he became increasingly worried about his son: ‘received a letter from Walter dated April; he is penniless and without any prospect of employment’. He sent out money and hoped Walter would come home. Then, to his great surprise, in July 1847 Mantell received a letter from him saying that he had come across interesting fossils and proposed to ship them to his father. Walter’s box arrived from New Zealand just before Christmas. Opening it, Mantell saw that it contained more than eight hundred specimens – ‘in fine preservation,’ he noted with pride. Walter’s collection, he thought, was the best that had ever reached Europe, containing many rarities, including the bones of a large, flightless bird, the moa or Dinornis.
In an ironic twist, Walter’s discoveries served to confirm the brilliance of Owen’s insights ten years earlier. There were many more parts of the skeleton: a perfect skull, where previously only portions of crania had been found; eggshells, jaws and other bones. Almost incredibly, given the hostility between them, Mantell invited Owen to his new home in Chester Square and gave him Walter’s rare and precious bones. It is possible that he was hoping to restore cordial relations with such a potentially powerful ally, or perhaps he recognised his own lack of knowledge of the moa. ‘As Professor Owen has made the subject peculiarly his own,’ Mantell told a friend, ‘I determined to forgo the pride and pleasure of describing these new acquisitions and allow him to have use of all the novelties my son has collected.’
Walter’s discoveries provoked yet more interest in the flightless birds. Since the bones were not properly fossilised and there were persistent rumours from the Maoris that giant birds had been sighted, some believed they might not be extinct. Walter hoped to make his fortune tracking down the first living specimen. His new-found interest in science delighted his father and prompted much correspondence.
Within a few months, Walter was appointed Commissioner for the Purchase of Lands by the Governor of New Zealand. He intended, as he toured the middle island, to study the natural history of the islands, and was determined to trace the elusive birds. ‘If there is a live Moa, my son will catch it,’ Gideon Mantell told his friends proudly.
Meanwhile Reginald, his younger son, had returned from America and was working as an engineer with Mr Brunel, building the Great Western Railway. As he was supervising the works between Chippenham and Trowbridge, his team uncovered superb fossil belemnites. Reginald’s fossils proved that Owen’s applauded study of belemnites, which had earned the Royal Medal, was wrong. The disinterred belemnites proved, as the amateur Chaning Pearce had maintained, that Owen had falsely ascribed features to the squid-like creature that it did not have. This belonged to that same distinct genus that Pearce had discovered: Belemnoteuthis.
Mantell, now armed with the evidence, could not resist taking on Richard Owen. He prepared a paper for the Royal Society describing the intricate details of the Belemnoteuthis anatomy and its shelly exterior coating, or capsule. It was a minor detail in the interpretation of invertebrate anatomy, but a major setback for Owen. ‘He was not one to admit having been mistaken with good feeling,’ Mantell wrote to Professor Silliman. Almost absurdly, when the real fight was about the dinosaurs, the battle lines became drawn over this small squid-like creature.
An unusually large number gathered to hear Gideon Mantell’s paper to the Royal Society in 1848. Although couched in the restrained language of science, he felt that his comments made it clear that Richard Owen’s paper ‘was a tissue of blunders from beginning to end’. However, Owen had ensured that he had supporters present. ‘After the paper was read, Professor Owen got up and made the most ungentlemanly and uncalled for attack upon it,’ wrote Mantell. ‘He said that I ought not to have presumed to occupy the time of the Royal Society … and after ridiculing for half an hour all that I had written, sat down and was actually applauded by many.’ This prompted his old ally the Dean of Westminster to rise and strongly defend Mantell’s paper as ‘in the highest degree important’. According to the editor of the London Geological Journal, Edward Charlesworth: ‘there was a most animated discussion in which all who took part, including Buckland, Bowerbank and others, made a resolute stand against Owen on behalf of poor Chaning’s Genus, Belemnoteuthis’.
The point had been made. The alleged ‘Newton of Natural History’ was not infallible. But as Mantell was well aware, Owen was intolerant and resented ‘that anyone put a foot upon the lowest step of his throne’. It wasn’t long before they were to clash again, this time over a fossil that Mantell had dreamed of finding for years.
In March 1848, Gideon Mantell received an unexpected package from a stranger, a Captain Lambart Brickenden. The Captain, who was the proprietor of the quarries in the Tilgate Forest in Sussex, had uncovered an Iguanodon jaw. It was not complete, but merely a part of the lower jaw, over twenty inches long, very heavy and a rich umber colour. There were sockets for seventeen or eighteen identically shaped teeth and two tiny replacement teeth. Although the upper jaw was missing and the adult teeth were no longer attached, the replacement teeth proved the animal was reptilian. Here was the elusive evidence that Cuvier had urged Mantell to find in the early days, when no one believed that he had found a new reptile. And now the treasure he had looked for for so long and desired so desperately was found. Mantell was in no doubt of its significance: ‘Here, after thirty years’ search,’ he wrote, ‘is an unequivocal portion of the dental organs of that marvellous reptile.’
At the time there was a Chartist riot going on in London. Cannon were in place at the palace, and soldiers in the streets. Mantell waited until the crisis was past before he ventured out to the British Museum to compare the fossil with the jaws of other animals. To ease the burden, since he was in some pain, he collaborated with a skilled anatomist, Dr Alexander Melville, Professor of Zoology at Queen’s College. Comparing the lower jaw with others in the museum, they wrote, ‘we are at once struck with their remarkable deviation from all known types in the class of reptiles’.
The Iguanodon jaw had a curious combination of characteristics. Unlike living iguanas or the large extinct lizards whose jaws ‘are armed with teeth to the anterior extremity’, this jaw expanded at the front into a ‘scoop-shaped projection’ similar to the extended lower jaw of the mammalian sloth. From its teeth, they knew that Iguanodon masticated its food like modern ruminants, while the method of implantation of the teeth and their replacement cycle was more like those of reptiles.
Mantell was invited to deliver a paper on the jaw at the Royal Society on 18 May 1848. ‘Although several hundred teeth … of Saurians have been collected,’ he began, ‘but a few fragments of the jaw have been discovered … It is therefore most gratifying to have it in my power to lay before the Royal Society … the first indisputable portion of the jaw of the Iguanodon hitherto brought to light.’
The replacement cycle of Iguanodon teeth, which he had longed to prove as a young man, he now described in detail. The formative pulp was in a distinct cavity on the inner side of the root of the tooth that it was destined to supplant. ‘In the Iguanodon, the old teeth were retained until … the crown of the tooth, from abrasion by use above and removal of the fang by absorption below, was reduced to a mere disk, before it was finally shed.’ Since, he reasoned, all fangs showed some sign of absorption, ‘the formation of successional teeth was in constant progress at all periods of the animal’s existence, as is the case in most of the Saurian reptiles’.
Cautiously, he attempted to calculate the size of the dinosaur’s head. Since comparisons to the lower jaw of lizards suggested this bone represented nearly half the jaw, he estimated the total length of the jaw could be four feet. This, he acknowledged, was in disagreement with Professor Owen, who had claimed the largest Iguanodon head was only two and half feet long. To make his calculation, Owen had measured the length of six dorsal vertebrae, which in the iguana is equal to that of the lower jaw. ‘But even if we take the short blunt-headed lizards as the scale, for example the Chameleons,’ said Mantell, ‘the length of jaw of this Iguanodon must have exceeded three feet.’ There was, in fact, no way of proving the size of the head from the portion of jaw. Both were speculating, drawing their conclusions from analogies to different bones.
Mantell even attempted to define the soft tissues of the dinosaur’s face and the muscular adaptations that would be needed to chew tough plants and leaves. Because of the large number of holes for blood vessels at the front of the jaw, he reasoned that these supplied the muscles and soft parts around the mouth. From this, he inferred that ‘the under-lip was capable of being protruded and retracted’ and together with a ‘large, fleshy, prehensile tongue … formed a powerful instrument for seizing and cropping the leaves and branches’.
These ideas anticipated many later studies on the soft tissues of Iguanodon cheeks and mouth, although it is now known that it did not have a large, prehensile tongue. From the quantities of vegetables that it had to eat, ‘there must have been a large development of the abdominal region,’ Mantell reasoned. The rear and hind-legs he saw as bulky, ‘presenting the unwieldy contour of those of the Hippopotamus and Rhinoceros, with horned toes, and bulky muscular legs’. The teeth and jaw, he concluded, ‘demonstrate its power of mastication and the nature of its food’.
Finally, Mantell took a bold step and announced the existence of yet another dinosaur. An earlier discovery of a small fragment of lower jaw, he claimed, had been wrongly attributed to Iguanodon. He had examined fragments of bone and teeth from this unknown jaw under the microscope: it bore no resemblance to ‘the very fine, dense tooth ivory of the Hylaeosaurus’. Nor did it match any other known dinosaur. Although more similar to Iguanodon than to anything else, it was not identical. Mantell concluded that it was in fact from a new dinosaur, which he named the ‘Regnosaurus’.
But when Mantell had finished his talk, to his great dismay Professor Owen ceremoniously announced to the learned audience at the Royal Society that ‘a smaller and more perfect specimen of the jaw had already been found at Horsham’. Owen aimed to show that some of Mantell’s inferences were incorrect and that his Iguanodon jaw was not the first, as he had claimed. Mantell was astounded. He had no knowledge of any other fossil jaw of Iguanodon. Yet here was the professor, apparently eclipsing him once more.
It soon transpired that George Holmes, the Sussex collector patronised by Owen, had recently found a smaller specimen of part of the jaw from a young Iguanodon. Mantell’s friend Captain Brickenden, who owned the Tilgate quarries, went to see Holmes and made drawings of his fossil for Mantell. Although Holmes’s specimen showed more detail, Captain Brickenden was able to reassure Mantell that the second specimen affected none of his inferences. This incident, however, was one of several in which Holmes inadvertently stoked up the rivalry between Mantell and Owen.
Holmes acted on Owen’s behalf, sometimes making it difficult for Mantell to see his collection in Horsham or even to make drawings. He kept Owen informed of Mantell’s plans: ‘the Doctor [Mantell] expressed his intention to coming down before long to see my Collection,’ he advised Owen. ‘I do hope that thou wilt not be behindhand with him in thy visit, if thou canst possibly make it convenient to come.’ In another letter, Holmes told Owen that Mantell was researching the backbones of the giant reptiles. He described vertebrae that Mantell had identified and even pointed out an error that he might have made, which Owen could verify by checking with the Hylaeosaurus in the British Museum. It is no surprise that Mantell came to view Holmes as ‘a sly quaker’ and a ‘spy’ for Owen.
By now, Mantell was receiving fossils from several different sources. Captain Brickenden continued to send consignments from the Sussex Weald, and Mantell was also in contact with collectors on the Isle of Wight, even fishermen in Brook Bay and Sandown Bay. He hoped to obtain enough vertebrae to reconstruct the spine. This would enable him to prove the overall length of Iguanodon, the size and mobility of the neck and tail; even the creature’s bulk could be estimated by the way the ribs were attached and the size of the lumbar vertebrae.
He was becoming increasingly suspicious that vertebrae that Owen had attributed to different reptiles were, in fact, different parts of the spine of Iguanodon. Since he was so weak, he collaborated once more with Alexander Melville at the British Museum, who had the anatomical skills to help him take on Richard Owen. Mantell had been told the tumour was fast growing on his spine, at the site of the injury from the carriage accident, and there was no treatment available. His attempts to control the pain were becoming desperate. ‘Took hot brandy, and water with brandy and laudanum, ether and camphor, hot air bath, inspired chloroform. All unavailing,’ he wrote after one attack. Increasingly he turned to opiates for pain relief – at first laudanum in pharmaceutical doses and then liquor opii sedativus, an opium derivative. On one anniversary of Hannah’s death he was too ill to visit her grave. Summoning all the resources that were left in his increasingly frail body, he was determined to get as far as was humanly possible to elucidate the true appearance of Iguanodon. But he knew he was running out of time and longed to be free of pain: ‘living in the hope that death may give the imprisoned spirit freedom’.
In July 1848 Mantell read in The Gentleman’s Magazine of the suicide of his former Curator in Brighton, George Richardson. Shocking details of Richardson’s plight emerged at the inquest. He had had difficulties living within his curator’s pay of less than £100 a year. As his debts had mounted, he had faced bankruptcy and feared the disgrace. Richardson had been found ‘with his head nearly severed from his body, with a razor which lay near him’. Further investigations proved ‘that the deceased had deliberately sat before the looking glass and cut his throat. The glass, chair and razor were covered in blood.’ Gideon Mantell was shaken. Richardson had been a close ally in Brighton; his head, severed ‘from ear to ear’, was a gruesome image with which to end that episode in their lives. ‘I deeply deplore this melancholy event. It has haunted me ever since I heard of it,’ wrote Mantell.
As soon as Owen heard through Holmes of Mantell’s interest in the Iguanodon backbone, he wrote to warn his rival against publication. He was wasting his time, he threatened Mantell, since his own study was now virtually complete: ‘the first part of my work will appear soon after Xmas; 20 plates are already struck off, it will include the Reptiles of the Eocene formation. I shall next proceed to chalk, greensand and Wealden.’ Even though Mantell was the original discoverer of Iguanodon, Owen was becoming increasingly territorial about it and eager to be first with any new insights on the beast.
Owen’s actions merely served to goad Mantell into still greater effort. Almost absurdly, given his physical weakness, he and Melville devoted so many hours to their study that it was completed within a month of receiving Owen’s warning. ‘Dr Melville spent all day here, and while visiting my patients, he went on with his description of the vertebrae,’ Mantell wrote on 15 January 1849. ‘At eleven at night we finished the Memoir at last. Never was I so tired of a task of this nature before.’
Two months later, Gideon Mantell read his paper to the Royal Society. He did not have a complete backbone and acknowledged that ‘there is still no clue to guide us through the labyrinth but analogy’. Nonetheless, he had made progress. When he had begun his studies thirty years earlier, large vertebrae of dissimilar forms had been ‘vaguely assigned to the Iguanodon’. Many of these had subsequently been re-identified by Owen as part of different reptiles, such as Streptospondylus or Cetiosaurus. However, Mantell had acquired vertebrae from the Isle of Wight found together and showing such a ‘close affinity of the bones … as to leave little doubt that they belong to the same animal’. Armed with this evidence, he demolished Owen’s earlier identification of the vertebrae and showed they were in fact different parts of Iguanodon’s spine.
Professor Owen’s Streptospondylus vertebrae became Iguanodon’s cervical, or neck, vertebrae, and his Cetiosaurus vertebrae became the posterior dorsals and caudal, or tail, spines of Iguanodon. Mantell also described and provided measurements of the other parts of the spine, the anterior dorsal and lumbar vertebrae. This was the first time the different types of vertebrae had been correctly identified. His analysis revealed that the Iguanodon vertebrae were wide and tall, capable of supporting a bulky frame. Although not widely appreciated at the time, recent analysis by Dr David Norman at the University of Cambridge ‘proves Mantell and Melville to have been wholly correct in their conclusions’.
Most important of all, Gideon Mantell was the first to observe the small size of the humerus, the upper bone of the forelimb, which had major implications for recognising the true shape of the beast. As yet, no one had been able to identify the forelimbs with any certainty. Even though the upper forearm was embedded in the Maidstone specimen found in 1834, for years it had been overlooked since it was thought that these reptiles were four-footed creatures, with both fore- and hind-limbs of the same proportions. In the Maidstone Iguanodon the femur of the hind-leg was 33 inches long. There was no corresponding forelimb bone of equal size. Consequently, the humerus, which was only 20 inches long, was mistaken for a radius, the bone of the lower arm. Later, Owen suggested it might be a foot bone.
‘The question however, is now decided,’ announced Mantell, ‘by the discovery of a bone found in the Wealden strata of the Isle of Wight associated with other remains of the Iguanodon and which is undoubtedly a humerus because it cannot possibly be referred to any other part of the skeleton.’ It was also identical in shape to the bone that he had long suspected to be the humerus of the Maidstone specimen. In the Isle of Wight fossil the femur of the hind-leg was 4 feet 8 inches, and the humerus was 3 feet 2 inches. Allowing for compression, in both the Maidstone and Isle of Wight fossils, the humerus of the forelimb was a third smaller than the corresponding bone of the hind-limb.
This confirmed Mantell’s far-sighted view that the forelimbs of Iguanodon were much less bulky than the hind-legs. They were ‘long and slender and served as prehensile instruments … adapted for seizing and pulling down plants and branches of trees’. Unlike the hinder limbs and feet which were ‘strong and massive as in the hippopotamus’, to support its enormous carcass, the arms were capable of grabbing the lush tropical vegetation of ferns, cycads, reeds and conifers. Iguanodon, Mantell announced, was ‘one of the most remarkable herbivorous terrestrial quadrupeds that ever trod the surface of our planet’. With some satisfaction, he went on: ‘After a lapse of more than a quarter of a century, I conclude my attempts to restore the skeleton of the gigantic Saurian, of whose former existence a few isolated and water-worn teeth were the sole known indications.’ With the exception of the bones of the skull, the sternum and the lower forearm, ‘the entire skeleton may now be considered as determined’. The creature that had for so long occupied his mind was beginning to take shape.
Mantell was now challenging Owen’s supremacy in the field of dinosaurs. While Owen had relished cutting Mantell’s dinosaurs down to a mere 30 feet, there was accumulating evidence that some dinosaurs did indeed attain stupendous proportions. In the autumn of 1849 Mantell received the head of a tibia, or leg bone, of an Iguanodon that was a massive 58 inches in circumference. Soon friends told him of a miller at Malling Hill, near Lewes, who had uncovered another monstrous leg bone in the Weald. The new fossil proved to be ‘a glorious specimen of a humerus’. At four and half feet it was the longest portion of arm bone yet found. Gideon Mantell noted with interest that ‘it has not all the characters of a humerus of the Iguanodon’. But if it was not from an Iguanodon, then what was it?
This was not easy to resolve. After careful comparisons, he thought the bone bore most resemblance to lumbar vertebrae retrieved from the same pit and identified as part of the lizard known as ‘Cetiosaurus’ by Owen. Mantell made a trip ‘by express train’ to Oxford to Buckland’s museum, where there were other Cetiosaurus bones. These were very distinctive, with a spongy texture like the bones of a whale (hence the name Cetiosaurus, or ‘whale-lizard’). But the new humerus did not quite match any of these bones. In fact, it was unlike any of the saurian leg bones Mantell had seen before.
There was only one other possible conclusion: that it was from an entirely new kind of dinosaur, perhaps larger than any yet discovered. In a pointed gesture directed at Professor Owen, Mantell proposed the name ‘Colossosaurus’.
Soon he was at work on a paper for the Royal Society on his new ‘pet lizard’, as it was endearingly nicknamed by Silliman in the American Journal of Science. He purchased the large humerus for around £8 and commissioned an artist to draw the specimen. By November 1849, he had decided on a slightly more subtle name for his new beast: ‘Pelorosaurus’, from the Greek word pelor, or monster. Mantell’s Pelorosaurus was the first named dinosaur in a family known today as the sauropods (meaning ‘lizard-foot’), recognised as the largest creatures to have ever walked the earth.
A few months later, Gideon Mantell went on to identify yet another sauropod and his sixth dinosaur: Cetiosaurus. Owen had failed to recognise that Cetiosaurus was a dinosaur, and envisaged that it was related to crocodiles, ‘strictly aquatic, probably of marine habits’. From specimens obtained on the Isle of Wight, Mantell could see the creature had a fused sacrum of the ‘dinosaurian type’. The massive fused sacrum was one of Owen’s defining characteristics of a dinosaur. Since Mantell saw the Cetiosaurus sacrum first, he was able to beat Owen with his own definitions and correctly identify the animal as a dinosaur.
The giant sauropods are now known to include such dinosaurs as Diplodocus, Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus. They are characterised by very long necks and tails, and large bodies on pillar-like legs. Of all the dinosaurs, their skulls are smallest in relation to their body size. Using their long necks they could reach branches and leaves inaccessible to other dinosaurs, to consume vegetation. Seismosaurus, the largest dinosaur ever discovered, could exceed 120 feet. Mantell correctly estimated, just from the humerus, that Pelorosaurus could attain 80 feet.
With this success, towards the end of 1849 Gideon Mantell’s name was proposed once more for the prestigious Royal Medal of the Royal Society. But he learned that the committee passed over his paper on Iguanodon because of Owen’s disparaging remarks. On no less than three occasions the committee and Council of the Royal Society had met to decide the matter. Each time, Richard Owen did everything in his power to prevent the award being made to Mantell. ‘All Mantell had done,’ he argued, ‘was collect the fossils and let others work them out!’ Hearing of these closed sessions from a friend who was on the committee, Mantell was enraged. ‘What a pity a man of so much talent should be so dastardly and envious,’ he wrote to Professor Silliman. ‘Professor Owen claimed my papers in the Transactions were unworthy for such an honour. Although he received it himself for his paper on the Belemnite, which has proved to be utterly erroneous!’
Spurred on by his supporters, Mantell sent his paper on Iguanodon to the Royal Society and asked the Council to reconsider the award of the Royal Medal. In his own mind, it was the significance of his life’s work that was being debated. The years and years of being slighted by Owen finally became too much to bear. At stake here was who would get the credit for interpreting the key dinosaur fossils and defining the ancient creatures. But Owen was not prepared to acknowledge that his own work on dinosaurs was built on foundations laid by Mantell.
Under the watchful eye of the scientific community, justice had to be seen to be done. A fourth meeting of the Council and committee was called. Once more, Owen launched into an attack on Mantell, ridiculing his speculation that Iguanodon had cheeks and soft parts covering its gums, and pouring scorn on his work. This time Sir Charles Lyell was present, and rallied to his old friend’s defence. He discussed the merits of Mantell’s studies, pointed out how often Owen had used Mantell’s research in his own work, and quoted the high praise Mantell had received from Cuvier. Professor Buckland, too, had written to the committee of the Royal Society stating that all of Mantell’s papers, on Iguanodon, the foraminifera (marine organisms with perforated shells) and – in a pointed attack on Owen – the belemnites, qualified for the highest honours the Society could bestow. Consequently, on 30 November 1849, the Royal Medal was awarded to Mantell. Only Owen and one other member of the council cast a vote against him. When Mantell was invited into the meeting-room and informed of the decision, he noticed that ‘Owen sat opposite me and looked the picture of malevolence’.
Later, when Mantell was at a meeting at the Royal Society, Owen came up and shook hands with people near him, then stretched out his hand to Mantell, saying what a great pleasure it was to see him there. Was this, on Owen’s part, just a trivial and meaningless gesture, or was it perhaps a signal of reconciliation? Mantell, knowing full well how Owen had acted on the Royal Society Council, saw his duplicitous handshake, bowed and declined it. He would not touch the hand of the one who had so effortlessly tried to take it all away from him. Years of disappointment and frustration became crystalised in his seething irritation at the younger man, who had collected all the glory for the dinosaurs. To his mind he had been treated cheaply.
Despite Mantell’s acknowledged scholarship, Richard Owen never relaxed his grip on his rival. It was beyond him to concede any ground to the opposition. Possibly in an effort to pre-empt gossip about his own Royal Medal, under his influence, a glowing account of his analysis of the belemnite appeared later in the Quarterly Review. Owen’s friend, Justice Broderip, had written the article, with the text apparently checked and corrected by Owen himself.
As the vendetta escalated, Owen took yet more steps to undermine Mantell. Owen was hoping to publish a definitive work on British fossil reptiles. In October 1850, he applied to the Council of the Royal Society for permission to take many impressions from illustrations of fossil reptiles published in the Society’s journal. However, Owen failed to mention to the Council that some of these were, in fact, Mantell’s carefully researched illustrations. Instead, he implied that this was all his work, stating that they were ‘plates described by him in his 1842 report on British Fossil Reptiles’. Even Captain Brickenden’s famous Iguanodon jaw, which meant so much to Mantell, Owen implied was one of his own. Consequently, at a meeting of the Council on 24 October 1850, his request was granted.
When Mantell heard what had happened he could not contain his fury. He discussed the matter with Sir Charles Lyell, who ‘expressed his astonishment at such conduct,’ Mantell wrote. He confided in Captain Brickenden: ‘you cannot imagine the annoyance I have had again from Professor Owen; he is not satisfied with monopolising everything he can from my first discovered rocks but tries to rob me of the few things that I got from friends … He is more jealous and envious than ever!’
A month later, a special Council meeting was convened in the grand committee room of the Royal Society. Gideon Mantell had conclusive proof that some of the plates were not Owen’s from 1841, because many of the fossils had been found after this date. Owen was forced to backtrack; for him it was a trivial matter – he uttered an effusive, meaningless apology. But for Mantell: ‘every one of the Members of the council present seemed to be convinced that Owen, for once, had been caught and exposed in his duplicity’. Owen, he thought, was ‘overpaid, over-praised, and cursed with a jealous monopolising spirit!’
For so long contemptuous of anyone who stepped across his path, Richard Owen was fast becoming a law unto himself. He clashed with Charles Lyell, which some believed was retaliation for Lyell not supporting Owen’s manoeuvres at the British Museum, and with Alexander Melville, a supporter of Mantell’s. The affable biologist Hugh Falconer also fell victim to Owen’s schemes. Their dispute began when Owen ‘stole’ the naming of an American elephant from Falconer; hostilities later degenerated into bitter personal attacks, as they argued over the characteristics of certain extinct marsupials. Owen even went so far as to pick a fight with the Queen’s dentist, Alexander Nasmyth. Owen claimed authorship of Nasmyth’s interpretations of the structure and growth of teeth, and accused Nasmyth of plagiarising the ideas of others, exactly as he himself had done with the ‘dinosaur’. Eventually, loyal allies, too, such as George Holmes, were to turn against Owen. Holmes complained that he was being ‘shamefully treated’ when he discovered that some of his fossils were not being returned as agreed, but appropriated into Owen’s collection at the Royal College. Holmes may have realised that he had become merely one of Owen’s weapons in the battle against Mantell.
Owen seemed to thrive on feuds and antagonism, wounding his rivals with almost the same clinical satisfaction with which he tackled his dissections. He was described in one biography as a ‘social experimenter with a penchant for sadism and mystification’, and in another as ‘addicted to acrimonious controversy’ and driven by arrogance and jealousy. His rancorous disputes were to make a deep impression on one young anatomist who was struggling to establish himself in London – Thomas Henry Huxley.
Huxley had returned from a voyage on HMS Rattlesnake in 1850, then rapidly made a name for himself with studies on marine invertebrates that he had observed on his travels to Australia and New Guinea. Although these earned him a Royal Medal at the young age of twenty-eight, he struggled for years to obtain a paid scientific post: ‘a man of science may earn great distinction, but not bread,’ he told a friend. Huxley turned to Owen for help, but then became suspicious that Owen was not doing enough, although he did in fact write the young man a number of references. ‘It is astonishing with what an intense hatred Owen is regarded by most of his contemporaries, with Mantell as arch-hater,’ Huxley was to observe.
As if innocently oblivious of the mayhem he created in scientific circles, Owen portrayed Man in his public lectures as the pinnacle of Creation, made for God’s purpose. ‘The supreme work of Creation has been accomplished … for the service of the Soul. Think what it may become – the Temple of the Holy Spirit!’ he declared with galling virtue. ‘Defile it not. Seek rather to adorn it with … that fair furniture, moral and intellectual, which it is your inestimable privilege to acquire.’ With his ‘Archetypes’ and ‘Divine Plans’ and other technicalities which added not a little to the obscurity of his subject, no one, it seemed, could check his upward rise.
In March 1850, Owen was summoned to his first levee, or formal reception, at the palace, where he was presented to the Prince Consort by the Earl of Carlisle. In the same month, he was appointed to the Prince’s Council at Buckingham Palace to advise on the planned Great Exhibition. He immediately summoned a court tailor. With Caroline’s help, he ‘devised a very handsome and elegant attire, I think quite as good as any Court dress I saw. A rich sort of dahlia-brown cloth, with bright steel buttons, buckles, sword &c and white satin waistcoat with rich flowers embroidered. Lace cravat full and long, and the same for the cuffs. Cut steel loop in the cocked hat. All very fine, as Pepys would say.’ Soon Owen was invited to tutor the children of the royal family.
While Owen lightly shrugged off any opposition, the feud between the two men was exacting an ever more terrible toll on Mantell. Gradually, he was reduced to a shadow of his former self. When he met Lyell on one occasion, his old friend seemed quite shocked at the decline in his physical appearance. The years of pain showed. One doctor held out promise of an operation on his spine, but it was decided that it was too risky. Eventually, his damaged spine was forced into a painful curvature and his whole body became horribly twisted, as if to emphasise the disappointments and frustrations that filled his mind.
Aware of the relentless progress of his illness, he continued to find a welcome relief in the letters from his son. Walter did not find a live moa, but he sent many fossils from New Zealand, including ‘a matchless collection of fossil birds comprising nearly five hundred specimens’. One day in 1850, Mantell received a letter from him written from a mud hut, surrounded by six feet of snow, on a bleak shore of Bank’s Peninsula. Walter was excited because he had heard that two hundred miles away were some large caverns with bones of unknown animals on stalagmite floors. He must investigate them. He had completed his work as Commissioner for the Purchase of Lands, and could now afford to buy a house and land and settle down as a farmer. He urged his father to abandon his struggles in London, and come and stay with him. Mantell did not join his son, but he made arrangements to send out six hundred samples of rocks and minerals, a fifty-drawer cabinet and all the equipment necessary to investigate the caves. His son would want for nothing in the pursuit of science.