96 THE GERMAN TRANSCENDENTALISTS 



the jaws of crabs and insects with their other limbs, as 

 Savigny did later in a more scientific way. Among 

 Vertebrates the application of the theory of serial repetition 

 was not so obvious, except in the case of the vertebrae. 

 Goethe seems to have been the first to hit upon the idea that 

 the skull is composed of a number of vertebras, serially 

 homologous with those of the vertebral column. He tells us 

 that the idea flashed into his mind when contemplating in 

 the Jewish cemetery at Venice a dried sheep's skull. The 

 discovery was made in 1790, but not published till I.82O. 1 



The idea seems to have been taught by Kielmeyer, one 

 of the earliest of the " philosophers of nature," but it was not 

 published by him. 



In a book (Cours d' Etudes medicales], published in 1803, 

 Burdin assimilated the skull to the vertebral column. 



Oken, in an inaugural dissertation (Programrn) Ueber die 

 Bedeutung der ScJiadclknochen* published in 1807, gave to the 

 theory its necessary development. Autenrieth, also in i8o7, 3 

 distinguishing separate ganglia in the brain, was not far from 

 the hypothesis that each of these ganglia must have its 

 separate vertebra. 



In 1808 Dumeril read a paper to the Academic des 

 Sciences in which he compared the skull to a gigantic 

 VQrtebra, basing his hypothesis on the similarity existing 

 between the crests and depressions on the hinder part of the 

 skull and those on the posterior surfaces of the vertebrae. 



After Oken's work the vertebral theory was taken up 

 generally by both the German and the French anatomists. 

 Spix published in 1815 a large volume on the skull, entitled 

 Cephalogenesis, distinguishing (as Okcn did at first) three 

 cranial vertebrae. Bojanus in his Anatome testudinis europceae 

 (1819), and in a series of papers in Isis (1817-1819, and 1821) 

 established the existence of a fourth cranial vertebra, and 

 this was accepted by Oken in the later editions of his 

 Lchrlnich. Meckel and Carus among the Germans, do 

 Blainville and E. Geoffrey among the French, contributed to 



1 Zur Morphologic, i., 2, p. 250, 1820 ; and ii., 2, pp. 122-4, '824. 

 - See translation, giving the gist of this paper, in Huxley's Lectures on 

 the Elements of Comparative Anatomy, pp. 282-6, London, 1864. 

 3 Reil's Archii'.f. rhysiol., vii , 1807. 



