Internalism and Laws of Form 313
addressed simply: "J. Pearson Langshaw, Esq. (in or near) Lancaster." The stamp
cost only a penny, and Her Majesty's post managed to make the delivery with such
minimal information. Owen announced that he had a "crowlet to pluck" with his
friend for not visiting on a recent excursion near his whereabouts (Owen suspected
a fear of further humiliation at the checkerboard as the reason for Langshaw's
avoidance). Owen then spoke of a visit to Ireland, describing a new locality for
Megaceros (the "Irish Elk"), and noting that Britain had formed part of a mainland
during Pleistocene low sea levels. He ended with a note of chauvinism at the height
of British imperial and industrial expansion: "I very much enjoyed a fortnight with
the Tory Member for the County of Wicklow; visited a new locality of Megaceros,
confirmatory of its antiquity, and coevality with the Elephants and Rhinoceroses
which roamed over the continent represented now by certain Islands that set the
rest of the world to rights."
Yet, for all his political and institutional allegiance to his native land, Britain's
greatest vertebrate anatomist cast his intellectual lot with the continent that lay
abreast of those "certain islands" and championed the strongest version of
formalism—the theory of single generating archetypes, at least for all
vertebrates—in the land so well adapted for the functionalism of Paley and the
Bridgewater Treatises. * Owen sensed his incongruity and recognized that his
formalist message would be better heard in France or Germany than in his own
country. On the very first page of his greatest formalist monograph, On the Nature
of Limbs (1849), Owen wrote: "I became fully conscious how foreign to our
English philosophy were those ideas or trains of thought concerned in the
discovery of the anatomical truths, one of which I propose to explain on the present
occasion in reference to the limbs or locomotive extremities.
*Owen conceived his mission as marrying the schools of "morphology and teleology," or
formalism and functionalism; but, as we shall see, he forged this union with a clearly dominant
formalist partner, and therefore wins primary allegiance to this school by the proper criteria of
relative frequency and primacy of cause. This casting may seem ironic or contradictory in the
light of Owen's common designation as the "British Cuvier," and of his youthful visit to Cuvier
in 1831. But this common appellation primarily honored Owen's professional skill and his
domination of the discipline, not his ideology (the intended comparison being to Cuvier's power,
not to his ideas). Records of the Paris visit paradoxically affirm Cuvier's lack of influence; for,
although Owen frequently visited Cuvier, his notes and diaries feature a strange lack of
commentary on Cuvier's science or thought. Owen's grandson wrote in the standard life and
letters of his grandfather (1894, vol. 1, p. 50): "His rough diary, which he kept during his stay in
Paris, seldom mentions the fossil vertebrate collection, and shows that his interviews with Baron
Cuvier were for the most part of a purely social character. It notes, for example, that he attended
pretty regularly Cuvier's soirees held on Saturday evenings, and that he enjoyed the music. With
the diary agree his letters. Both devote page after page to the sights and amusement of Paris.
Owen, in fact, seems to have regarded his stay in Paris as an exceedingly pleasant and
entertaining holiday."
Huxley's remarkably fair eloge of Owen makes the same point: "It was not uncommon to
hear our countryman called 'the British Cuvier.' ... But when we consider Owen's contribution to
"philosophical anatomy," I think the epithet ceases to be appropriate. For there can be no
question that he was deeply influenced by, and inclined towards, those speculations of Oken and
Geoffroy St. Hilaire, of which Cuvier was the declared antagonist and often the bitter critic" (in
Owen, 1894, vol. 2, p. 312).