288 ON THE STRUCTURE OF THE VERTEBKATE SKULL. 



from the article in the "Encyclopaedia Britannica" already 

 cited (supra, p. 281), may not improbably excite in other minds 

 as much astonishment as it has in mine : — 



" As to the question of the superiority of the deductive over 

 the inductive method of philosophy, as illustrated by the writings 

 of Oken, his bold axiom that heat is but a mode of motion of 

 light, and the idea broached in his essay on * Generation ' 

 (1805), viz., that ' all the parts of higher animals are made up 

 of an aggregate of Infusoria, or aggregated globular Monads/ 

 are both of the same order as his proposition of the head being 

 a repetition of the trunk, with its vertebra? and limbs. Science 

 would have profited no more from the one idea without the 

 subsequent experimental discoveries of Oersted and Faraday, or 

 by the other, without the microscopical observations of Brown, 

 Schleiden, and Schwann, than from the third notion, without 

 the inductive demonstration of the segmental constitution of the 

 skull by Owen. It is questionable, indeed, whether in either 

 case the discoverers of the true theories were excited to their 

 labours, or in any way influenced, by the a priori guesses of 

 Oken ; more probable is it that the requisite researches and 

 genuine deductions therefrom were the results of the correlated 

 fitness of the stage of the science, and the gifts of its true culti- 

 vators at such particular stage." — P. 502. 



Thus does the moralist upon Goethe's supposed delin- 

 quencies think it just to depreciate the merits of Oken, and 

 exalt his own, in the year 1858. But if he himself had not 

 been " in any way influenced " by Oken, and if the " Pro- 

 gramm " is a mere mass of " a priori guesses," how comes it 

 that only three years before Mr. Owen could write thus?* 



" Oken, ce genie profond et penetrant, fut le premier qui 

 entrevit la verite, guide par l'heureuse idee de l'arrangement 

 des os craniens en segments, comme ceux du rachis, appeles 

 vertebres.' 



And, after sundry extracts frorn Oken's " Programm," could 

 continue : — 



"Ceci servira pour exemple d'un examen scrupuleux des 



* H 



Principes d'Osteologie comparee, ou Recherches sur l'Archetype et lcs 

 Homologies du Squelette vertebre." — P. 155. 1855. 



