282 ON THE STRUCTURE OF THE VERTEBRATE SKULL. 



epithet of " inspired idiot," applied to our own Goldsmith : so 

 strange is the mixture of insight and knowledge with what, to 

 my apprehension, is mere " sound and fury, signifying nothing." 

 But the " Programm ' contains far more of the former and 

 less of the latter ingredient than is usually noticeable in Oken's 

 lucubrations, and it appears to me to be, at the present moment, 

 by far the best specimen extant of the style of speculation about 

 the skull, characteristic of the school which Oken originated. 

 Indeed, if for the term " cranial vertebra?," " cranial segments ' : 

 be substituted, I do not know that the plan of composition of the 

 osseous brain-case can be better described than in the language 

 which I shall now quote.* 



The " Programm " opens thus : — 



" A vesicle ossifies, and it is a vertebra. A vesicle elongates 

 into a tube, becomes jointed, ossifies, and it is a vertebral 

 column. The tube gives off (according to laws) blind lateral 

 canals ; they ossify, and it is a trunk skeleton. This skeleton 

 repeats itself at the two poles, each pole repeats itself in the 

 other, and they are head and pelvis. The skeleton is only a 

 developed (aufgetvachsenes), ramified, repeated, vertebra ; and a 

 vertebra is the preformed germ of the skeleton. The entire 

 man is only a vertebra. 



"i. 



"Take a lamb's skull, separate from it those bones which 

 are considered to be facial, and those bones of the cerebral cap- 

 sule which take no share in the base, such as the frontal bones, 

 the parietal bones, the ethmoid and the temporal bone, and 

 there remains a bony column, which every anatomist will at 

 once recognise to be three bodies of some sort of vertebra?, with 

 their lateral processes and foramina. Replace the bones of the 

 cerebral capsule, with the exception of the temporal bones 

 (for the cavity is closed without these), and you have a vertebral 

 column, which is distinguished from the true one only by its 

 expanded spinal canal. As the brain is the spinal marrow 

 more voluminously developed [in relation] to more powerful 

 organs, so the brain-case is a more voluminous spinal column. 



* " Ueber die Bedentnng der Schadelknochen. Ein Programm beim Antritt 

 der Professur an der Gesammt-Universitat bei Jena.'' Von Dr. Oken. Jena. 1807. 



