Sir Richard Owen (1804-1892), comparative anatomist, colleague and later antagonist of Darwin, and head of the British Museum of Natural History, was a major figure in Victorian science. Yet historians of science have found Owen a difficult subject, in part because he chose not to expound his views in a major theoretical work but rather presented them through annual lectures at the Royal College of Surgeons from 1837 to 1856. Nevertheless, Owen's views on the nature of life, the relations of form and function, the meaning of fossils, and the development of species gave his contemporaries such as Lyell, Grant, Huxley, Whewell, and Darwin a set of positions with which they could agree or disagree while developing their own views. Now, for the first time, modern readers how access to the opening series of Owen's Hunterian Lectures, in which he set out the larger framework of the theoretical reflections that occupied him during the next nineteen years. Presented to the public in the two months before Darwin began his first notebook on the species question, these lectures reveal the nature of the synthesis of French, German, and British biology taking place in metropolitan London in this crucial period in nineteenth-century life science. Phillip Reid Sloan has transcribed and edited the seven surviving lectures and has written an introduction and commentary situating the work in the context of Owen's life and the scientific and intellectual life of the time. Sloan pays particular attention to Owen's early relations to the German scientific and philosophical tradition, and in this respect contributes to an understanding of the relations between science and British Romanticism. In the lectures, Owen surveys the history of comparative anatomy up to his time and develops his views on the nature of life, species duration, physiological function, and the relation between embryology and classification. One can see the degree to which transcendental anatomy and the views of Von Baer, Johannes Müller, E. G. St.-Hilaire, and Cuvier were current in London in the late 1830s. -- from back cover.

Includes book reviews and abstracts.

Discusses the history of evolutionary science as it relates to current knowledge of the transformation of body types through evolution. Focusing primarily on the emergence of the first land creatures 360 million years ago and the later return to the sea of the ancestors of whales and dolphins some 60 million years ago, the author uses findings from paleontology, ecology, genetics, and embryology to explain broad mechanisms of speciation. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Includes no. 53a: British wartime books for young people.

Champion of modern education, creator of an intellectually dominated profession, T.H. Huxley epitomized the rise of the middle classes as they clawed power from the Anglican elite. Written with enormous zest and passion, "Huxley" is about the making of our modern Darwinian world. Photos.