Literary Pilgrimages Of A Naturalist

But the insults had not quite finished. Soon after MantellБЂ™s death an arrestingly uncharitable obituary appeared in the Literary Gazette. In it Mantell was characterized as a mediocre anatomist whose modest contributions to paleontology were limited by a БЂњwant of exact knowledge.БЂ«The obituary even removed the discovery of the iguanodon from him and credited it instead to Cuvier and Owen, among others. Though the piece carried no byline, the style was OwenБЂ™s and no one in the world of the natural sciences doubted the authorship. By this stage, however, OwenБЂ™s transgressions were beginning to catch up with him. His undoing began when a committee of the Royal Society-a committee of which he happened to be chairman-decided to award him its highest honor, the Royal Medal, for a paper he had written on an extinct mollusc called the belemnite. БЂњHowever,БЂ«as Deborah Cadbury notes in her excellent history of the period, Terrible Lizard, БЂњthis piece of work was not quite as original as it appeared.БЂ«The belemnite, it turned out, had been discovered four years earlier by an amateur naturalist named Chaning Pearce, and the discovery had been fully reported at a meeting of the Geological Society ...»