PROGRESS OF ANIilAL MORPHOLOGY. 477 



observation and for general v lews, which had produced his Metamor- 

 phosis of Plants, he pursued his speculations on these subjects eagerly 

 and successfully. And in 1795, he published a Sketch of a Universal 

 Introduction into Comparative Anatomy, beginning with Osteology ; 

 in which he attempts to establish an " osteological type," to which 

 skeletons of all animals may be referred. I do not pretend that 

 Gothe's anatomical works have had any influence on the progress of 

 the science comparable with that which has been exercised by the 

 labors of professional anatomists ; but the ingenuity and value of the 

 views which they contained was acknowledged by the best authorities; 

 and the clearer introduction and application of the principle of de- 

 veloped and metamorphosed symmetry may be dated from about this 

 time. Gothe declares that, at an early period of these speculations, 

 he was convinced 5 that the bony head of beasts is to be derived from 

 six vertebrae. In 1807, Oken published a "Program" On the Sig- 

 nification of the Bones of the Skull, in which he maintained that 

 these bones are equivalent to four vertebrae ; and Meckel, in his Com- 

 parative Anatomy, in 1811, also resolved the skull into vertebrae. 

 But Spix, in his elaborate work Cephalogenesis, in 1815, reduced the 

 vertebrae of the head to three. "Oken," he says,* "published 

 opinions merely theoretical, and consequently contrary to those main- 

 tained in this work, which are drawn from observation." This reso- 

 lution of the head into vertebrae is assented to by many of the best 

 physiologists, as explaining the distribution of the nerves, and other 

 phenomena. Spix farther extended the application of the vertebral 

 theory to the heads of all classes of vertebrate animals ; and Bojanus 

 published a Memoir expressly on the vertebral structure of the skulls 

 of fishes in Oken's Isis for 1818. Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire presented a 

 lithographic plate to the French Academy in February 1824, entitled 

 Composition de la Tete osseuze chez VHomme et les Animaux, and de- 

 veloped his views of the vertebral composition of the skull in two 

 Memoirs published in the Annales des Sciences Naturelles for 1824. 

 We cannot fail to recognize here the attempt to apply to the skeleton 

 of animals the principle which, leads botanists to consider all the parts 

 of a flower as transformations of the same organs. How far the 

 application of the principle, as here proposed, is just, I must leave phi- 

 osophical physiologists to decide. 

 By these and similar researches, it is held by the best physiologist? 



6 Zur Morphologie, 250. ' Spix, Cephalogenesis. 



