animals. His Comparative Anatomy and Physiology of Vertebrates (3 vols., London, 1866-1868) was indeed the result of more personal research than any similar work since Cuvier's Leçons d'anatomie comparée. He not only studied existing forms, but also devoted great attention to the remains of extinct groups, and immediately followed Cuvier as a pioneer in vertebrate palaeontology. Early in his career he made exhaustive studies of teeth, both of existing and extinct animals, and published his profusely illustrated work on Odontography (1840-1845). He discovered and described the remarkably complex structure of the teeth of the extinct animals which he named Labyrinthodonts. Among his writings on fishes, his memoir on the African mud-fish, which he named Protopterus, laid the foundations for the recognition of the Dipnoi by Johannes Müller. He also pointed out later the serial connexion between the teleostean and ganoid fishes, grouping them in one sub-class, the Teleostomi. Most of his work on reptiles related to the skeletons of extinct forms, and his chief memoirs on British specimens were reprinted in a connected series in his History of British Fossil Reptiles (4 vols., London, 1849-1884). He published the first important general account of the great group of Mesozoic land-reptiles, to which he gave the now familiar name of Dinosauria. He also first recognized the curious early Mesozoic land-reptiles, with affinities both to amphibians and mammals, which he termed Anomodontia. Most of these were obtained from South Africa, beginning in 1845 (Dicynodon), and eventually furnished materials for his Catalogue of the Fossil Reptilia of South Africa, issued by the British Museum in 1876. Among his writings on birds, his classical memoir on the Apteryx (18401846), a long series of papers on the extinct Dinornithidae of New Zealand, other memoirs on Aptornis, Notornis, the dodo, and the great auk, may be specially mentioned. His monograph on Archaeopteryx (1863), the long-tailed, toothed bird from the Bavarian lithographic stone, is also an epoch-making work. With regard to living mammals, the more striking of Owen's contributions relate to the monotremes, marsupials, and the anthropoid apes. He was also the first to recognize and name the two natural groups of typical Ungulata, the odd-toed (Perissodactyla) and the even-toed (Artiodactyla), while describing some fossil remains in 1848. Most of his writings on mammals, however, deal with extinct forms, to which his attention seems to have been first directed by the remarkable fossils collected by Darwin in South America. Toxodon, from the pampas, was then described, and gave the earliest clear evidence of an extinct generalized hoof animal, a "pachyderm with affinities to the Rodentia, Edentata, and Herbivorous Cetacea." Owen's interest in South American extinct mammals then led to the recognition of the giant armadillo, which he named Glyptodon (1839), and to classic memoirs on the giant ground-sloths, Mylodon (1842) and Megatherium (1860), besides other important contributions. At the same time Sir Thomas Mitchell's discovery of fossil bones in New South Wales provided material for the first of Owen's long series of papers on the extinct mammals of Australia, which were eventually reprinted in book-form in 1877. He discovered Diprotodon and Thylacoleo, besides extinct kangaroos and wombats of gigantic size. While occupied with so much material from abroad, Owen was also busily collecting facts for an exhaustive work on similar fossils from the British Isles, and in 1844-1846 he published his History of British Fossil Mammals and Birds, which was followed by many later memoirs, notably his Monograph of the Fossil Mammalia of the Mesozoic Formations (Palacont. Soc., 1871). One of his latest publications was a little work entitled Antiquity of Man as deduced from the Discovery of a Human Skeleton during Excavations of the Docks at Tilbury (London, 1884).

Owen's detailed memoirs and descriptions require laborious attention in reading, on account of their nomenclature and ambiguous modes of expression; and the circumstance that very little of his terminology has found universal favour causes them to be more generally neglected than they otherwise would be. At the same time it must be remembered that he was a pioneer in concise anatomical nomenclature; and, so far

at least as the vertebrate skeleton is concerned, his terms were based on a carefully reasoned philosophical scheme, which first clearly distinguished between the now familiar phenomena of "analogy" and "homology." Owen's theory of the Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton (1848), subsequently illustrated also by his little work On the Nature of Limbs (1849), regarded the vertebrate frame as consisting of a series of fundamentally identical segments, each modified according to its position and functions. Much of it was fanciful, and failed when tested by the facts of embryology, which Owen systematically ignored throughout his work. However, though an imperfect and distorted view of certain great truths, it possessed a distinct value at the time of its conception. To the discussion of the deeper problems of biological philosophy he made scarcely any direct and definite contributions. His generalities rarely extended beyond strict comparative anatomy, the phenomena of adaptation to function, and the facts of geographical or geological distribution. His lecture on "virgin reproduction or parthenogenesis, however, published in 1849, contained the essence of the theory of the germ-plasm elaborated later by August Weismann; and he made several vague statements concerning the geological succession of genera and species of animals and their possible derivation one from another. He referred especially to the changes exhibited by the successive forerunners of the crocodiles (1884) and horses (1868); but it has never become clear how much of the modern doctrines of organic evolution he admitted. He contented himself with the bare remark that "the inductive demonstration of the nature and mode of operation" of the laws governing life would "henceforth be the great aim of the philosophical naturalist."

See The Life of Richard Owen, by his grandson, Rev. Richard Owen (2 vols., London, 1894). (A. S. Wo.) OWEN, ROBERT (1771-1858), English social reformer, was born at Newtown, Montgomeryshire, in North Wales, on the 14th of May 1771. His father had a small business in Newtown as saddler and ironmonger, and there young Owen received all his school education, which terminated at the age of nine. After serving in a draper's shop for some years he settled in Manchester. His success was very rapid. When only nineteen years of age he became manager of a cotton mill in which five hundred people were employed, and by his administrative intelligence and energy soon made it one of the best establishments of the kind in Great Britain. In this factory Owen used the first bags of American sea-island cotton ever imported into the country; it was the first sea-island cotton from the Southern States. Owen also made remarkable improvement in the quality of the cotton spun; and indeed there is no reason to doubt that at this early age he was the first cotton-spinner in England, a position entirely due to his own capacity and knowledge of the trade. In 1794 of 1795 he became manager and one of the partners of the Chorlton Twist Company at Manchester. During a visit to Glasgow he had fallen in love with the daughter of the proprietor of the New Lanark mills, David Dale. Owen induced his partners to purchase New Lanark; and after his marriage with Miss Dale he settled there, as manager and part owner of the mills (1800). Encouraged by his great success in the management of cotton factories in Manchester, he had already formed the intention of conducting New Lanark on higher principles than the current commercial ones.

The factory of New Lanark had been started in 1784 by Dale and Arkwright, the water-power afforded by the falls of the Clyde being the great attraction. Connected with the mills were about two thousand people, five hundred of whom were children, brought, most of them, at the age of five or six from the poorhouses and charities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. The children especially had been well treated by Dale, but the general condition of the people was very unsatisfactory. Many of them were the lowest of the population, the respectable country people refusing to submit to the long hours and demoralizing drudgery of the factories; theft, drunkenness, and other vices were common; education and sanitation were alike neglected; most families

Owen left four sons, Robert Dale, William, David Dale and Richard, all of whom became citizens of the United States. ROBERT DALE OWEN, the eldest (1801-1877), was for long an able exponent in his adopted country of his father's doctrines. In 1836-39 and 1851-52 he was a member of the Indiana House of Representatives and in 1844-47 was a Representative in Congress, where he drafted the bill for the founding of the Smithsonian Institution. He was elected a member of the Indiana Constitutional Convention in 1850, and was instrumental in securing to widows and married women control of their property, and the adoption of a common free school system. He later succeeded in passing a state law giving greater freedom in divorce. From 1853 to 1858 he was United States minister at Naples. He was a strong believer in spiritualism and was the author of two well-known books on the subject: Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World (1859) and The Debateable Land Between this World and the Next (1872). Owen's third son, DAVID DALE OWEN (1807-1860), was in 1839 appointed United States geologist, and made extensive surveys of the north-west, which were published by order of Congress. The youngest son, RICHARD OWEN (1810-1890), was a professor of natural science in Nashville University.

Of R. Owen's numerous works in exposition of his system, the most important are the New View of Society; the Report communicated to the Committee on the Poor Law; the Book of the New Moral World; and Revolution in the Mind and Practice of the Human Race. See Life of Robert Owen written by himself (London, 1857), and Threading my Way, Twenty-seven Years of Autobiography, by Robert Dale Owen (London, 1874). There are also Lives of Owen by A. J. Booth (London, 1869), W. L. Sargant (London, 1860), Lloyd Jones (London, 1889), F. A. Packard (Philadelphia, 1866) and F. Podmore (London, 1906). See also H. Simon, Robert Owen: sein Leben und seine Bedeutung für die Gegenwart (Jena, 1905); E. Dolléans, Robert Owen (Paris, 1905); G. J. Holyoake, History of Co-operation in England (London, 1906); and the article Com

MUNISM.

OWENS, JOHN (1790-1846), English merchant, was born at Manchester in 1790, the son of a prosperous merchant. Early in life he became a partner in his father's business and was soon noted for his ability as a cotton buyer. His business prospered, and the firm traded with China, India, South America and the United States, dealing in many other commodities. His large fortune he suggested leaving to his friend and partner George Faulkner (1790-1860), already a rich man. But by the latter's advice he bequeathed it to trustees for the foundation of a college (Owens College, Manchester, opened 1851, now part of Victoria University), based upon his own ideas of education. He died in Manchester on the 29th of July 1846. His bequests to friends and charities amounted to some £52,000, while for the college he left £96,654. Among the conditions for its foundation the most important was that which discountenanced any sort of religious test for students or teachers.

OWENSBORO, a city and the county-seat of Daviess county, Kentucky, U.S.A., on the Ohio river, 112 m. by rail W.S.W. of Louisville. Pop. (1890) 9837; (1900) 13,189, of whom 3061 were negroes; (1910 census) 16,011. The city is served by the Illinois Central, the Louisville & Nashville, and the Louisville, Henderson & St Louis railways, and by steamboat lines to river ports. At Owensboro are the Owensboro College for women (nonsect.), opened in 1890, Saint Francis Academy, and a Roman Catholic school for boys. Two miles S. of the city is Hickman Park (20 acres), a pleasure resort, and E. of the city is a summer

region; coal, iron, building stone, clay, oil, lead and zinc abound in the vicinity; and the city has a notably large trade in tobacco (especially strip tobacco) and has various manufactures. The value of the city's factory products increased from $1,740,128 in 1900 to $4,187,700 in 1905, or 140.6%. The municipality owns and operates its electric-lighting plant and water-works. Owensboro was settled about 1798, and for several years was commonly known as Yellow Banks; in 1816 it was laid out as a town and named Rossborough, and two years later the present name was adopted in honour of Colonel Abraham Owen (17691811), a Virginian who removed to Kentucky in 1785, served in several Indian campaigns, and was killed in the battle of Tippecanoe. Owensboro was incorporated as a city in 1866.

OWEN SOUND, a town and port of entry in Ontario, Canada, and capital of Grey county, situated 99 m. N.W. of Toronto, on Georgian Bay. Pop. (1901) 8776. It is the terminus of branches of the Canadian Pacific and Grand Trunk railways, and of the Canadian Pacific and other steamship lines plying to ports on Lakes Huron and Superior. Its harbour is one of the best on Lake Huron, and navigable by lake vessels of the largest size. It is a flourishing town, containing shipbuilding yards, and manufactories of mill machinery, agricultural implements, furniture and sewing-machines, flour-mills, saw-mills and large grain elevators.

OWL (O. Eng. Úle, Swed. Uggla, Ger. Eule-all allied to Lat. Ulula, and evidently of imitative origin), the general English name for every nocturnal bird of prey, of which group nearly two hundred species have been recognized. The owls form a very natural assemblage, and one about the limits of which no doubt has for a long while existed. They were formerly placed with the Accipitres or diurnal birds of prey, but are now known to belong to a different group of birds, and are placed as a suborder Striges of Coraciiform birds, their nearest

allies being the goatsuckers. The subdivision of the group has always been a fruitful matter of discussion, owing to the great resemblance obtaining among all its members, and the existence of safe characters for its division has only lately been at all generally recognized. By the older naturalists, it is true, owls were divided, as was first done by F. Willughby, into two sections-one in which all the species exhibit tufts of feathers in which the head is not tufted. The artificial and therefore on the head, the so-called " ears or "horns," and the second untrustworthy nature of this distinction was shown by Isidore Geoffroy St-Hilaire (Ann. Sc. Naturelles, xxi. 194-203) in 1830. The later work of C. L. Nitzch on pterylography and of A. Milne-Edwards on osteology has led to a division of the family Strigidae into the sub-families Striginae, in which the unnotched sternum has its broad keel joined to the furcula, and Buboninae, in which the sternum is notched posteriorly, the clavicles do not always meet to form a furcula, nor meet the sternum. The Striginae contain the screech- or barn-owls (Strix) and the partly intermediate Heliodilus of Madagascar, whilst all the other genera are now placed with the Buboninae.

Among owls are found birds which vary in length from 5 in. -as Glaucidium cobanense, which is therefore much smaller than a skylark-to more than 2 ft., a size that is attained by many species. Their plumage, none of the feathers of which possesses an aftershaft, is of the softest kind, rendering their flight almost noiseless. But one of the most characteristic features of this whole group is the ruff, consisting of several rows of small and much curved feathers with stiff shaftsoriginating from a fold of the skin, which begins on each side of the base of the beak, runs above the eyes, and passing downwards round and behind the ears turns forward, and ends at the chinand serving to support the longer feathers of the "disk " or space immediately around the eyes, which extend over it. A considerable number of species of owls, belonging to various genera, and natives of countries most widely separated, are remarkable for exhibiting two phases of coloration-one in which the prevalent browns have a more or less rusty-red tinge, and the other in which they incline to grey. Another characteristic of

owls is the reversible property of their outer toes, which are when perching quite backwards. Many forms have the legs and toes thickly clothed to the very claws; others have the toes, and even the tarsi, bare, or only sparsely beset by bristles. Among the bare-legged owls those of the Indian Ketupa are conspicuous, and this feature is usually correlated with their fish-catching habits; but certainly other owls that are not known to catch fish present much the same character.

Among the multitude of owls there is only room here to make further mention of a few of the more interesting. First must be noticed the tawny owl-the Strix stridula of Linnaeus, the type, as has been above said, of the whole group, and especially of the Strigine section as here understood. This is the Syrnium aluco of some authors, the chat-huant of the French, the species whose tremulous hooting" tu-whit, to-who," has been celebrated by Shakespeare, and, as well as the plaintive call, "keewick," of the young after leaving the nest, will be familiar sounds to many readers, for the bird is very generally distributed throughout most parts of Europe, extending its range through Asia Minor to Palestine, and also to Barbary-but not belonging to the Ethiopian Region or to the eastern half of the Palaearctic. It

FIG. 1.-Strix occidentalis..

is the largest of the species indigenous to Britain, and is strictly a woodland bird, only occasionally choosing any other place for its nest than a hollow tree. Its food consists almost entirely of small mammals, chiefly rodents; but, though on this account most deserving of protection from all classes, it is subject to the stupid persecution of the ignorant, and is rapidly declining in numbers. Its nearest allies in North America are the S. nebulosa, with some kindred forms, one of which, the S. occidentalis of California and Arizona, is figured above; but none of them seem to have the "merry note" that is uttered by the European species. Common to the most northerly forest-tracts of both continents (for, though a slight difference of coloration is observable between American examples and those from the Old World, it is impossible to consider it specific) is the much larger S. cinerea or S. lapponica, whose iron-grey plumage, delicately mottled with dark brown, and the concentric circles of its facial disks make it one of the most remarkable of the group. Then may be noticed the genus Bubo-containing several species All owls have the habit of casting up the indigestible parts of the food swallowed in the form of pellets, which may often be found in abundance under the owl-roost, and reveal without any manner of doubt what the prey of the birds has been. The result in nearly every case shows the enormous service they render to man in destroying rats and mice. Details of many observations to this effect are recorded in the Bericht über die XIV. Versammlung der Deutschen Ornithologen-Gesellschaft (pp. 30-34).

66

which from their size are usually known as eagle-owls. Here the Nearctic and Palaearctic forms are sufficiently distinctthe latter, B. ignavus, the duc or grand duc of the French, ranging over the whole of Europe and Asia north of the Himalayas, while the former, B. virginianus, extends over the whole of North America. A contrast to the generally sombre colour of these birds is shown by the snowy owl, Nyctea scandiaca, a circumpolar species, and the only one of its genus, which disdains the shelter of forests and braves the most rigorous arctic climate, though compelled to migrate southward in winter when no sustenance is left for it. Its large size and white plumage, more or less mottled with black, distinguish this from every other owl. Then may be mentioned the birds commonly known in English as "horned " owls-the hibous of the French, belonging to the genus Asio. One, A. otus (the Otus vulgaris of some authors), inhabits woods, and, distinguished by its long tufts, usually borne erected, would seem to be common to both America and Europe-though experts profess their ability to distinguish between examples from each country. Another species, A. accipitrinus (the Otus brachyotus of many authors), has much shorter tufts on its head, and they are frequently carried depressed so as to escape observation. This is the 'woodcock-owl" of English sportsmen, for, though a good many are bred in Great Britain, the majority arrive in autumn from Scandinavia, just about the time that the immigration of woodcocks occurs. This species frequents heaths, moors and the open country generally, to the exclusion of woods, and has an enormous geographical range, including not only all Europe, North Africa and northern Asia, but the whole of Americareaching also to the Falklands, the Galapagos and the Sandwich Islands-for the attempt to separate specifically examples from those localities only shows that they possess more or less well-defined local races. Commonly placed near Asio, but whether really akin to it cannot be stated, is the genus Scops, of which nearly forty species, coming from different parts of the world, have been described; but this number should probably be reduced by one half. The type of the genus S. giu, the petit duc of the French, is a well-known bird in the south of Europe, about as big as a thrush, with very delicately pencilled plumage, occasionally visiting Britain, emigrating in autumn across the Mediterranean, and ranging very far to the eastward. Farther southward, both in Asia and Africa, it is represented by other species of very similar size, and in the eastern part of North America by S. asio, of which there is a tolerably distinct western form, S. kennicotti, besides several local races. S. asio is one of the owls that especially exhibits the dimorphism of coloration above mentioned, and it was long before the true state of the case was understood. At first the two forms were thought to be distinct, and then for some time the belief obtained that the ruddy birds were the young of the greyer form which was called S. naevia; but now the "red owl" and the "mottled owl" of the older American ornithologists are known to be one species. One of the most remarkable of American owls is Speotyto cunicularia, the bird that in the northern part of the continent inhabits the burrows of the prairie dog, and in the southern those of the biscacha, where the latter occurs-making holes for itself, says Darwin, where that is not the case-rattlesnakes being often also joint tenants of the same abodes. The odd association of these animals, interesting as it is, cannot here be more than noticed, for a few words must be said, ere we leave the owls of this section, on the species which has associations of a very different kind-the bird of Pallas Athene, the emblem of the city to which science and art were so welcome. There can be no doubt, from the many representations on coins and sculptures, as to their subject being the Carine noctua of modern ornithologists, but those who know the grotesque actions and ludicrous expression of this veritable buffoon of birds can never

This species bears confinement very well, and propagates freely therein. To it belong the historic owls of Arundel Castle.

See the remarks of Mr Ridgway in the work before quoted (B. N. America, iii. 9, 10), where also response is made to the observations of Mr Allen in the Harvard Bulletin (ii. 338, 339).