1893. OWEN. 21 



sign of ever having entertained the fanciful notion that the head was 

 a repetition of the whole body. By the clear and emphatic distinction 

 he made between Analogy and Homology, by his account of special 

 and general homologues, and by his exposition of serial 

 and lateral homologies, he spread abroad in England the perception 

 that a deep significance underlies the structure of animals — a signifi- 

 cance for which no stress and strain, and no influence of heredity, and 

 certainly no mere practical utility, can account. 



The temporary overclouding of this perception through the 

 retrograde influence of Darwin's hypothesis of " Natural Selection " 

 is now slowly, but surely, beginning to pass away ; for which no small 

 thanks are due to the efforts of his zealous disciples, Professors 

 Weismann and Romanes. It would be out of place to trouble our 

 readers with a restatement ^ of simple facts of lateral and serial 

 homology ; we will confine ourselves to once more repeating the 

 assertion that homologies for which neither heredity nor utility will 

 account, reveal themselves in the limbs of chelonians, birds, beasts, 

 and most notably in those of man. 



It was, in all probability, a clear perception of this fundamental 

 fact of animal organisation which led Sir Richard Owen at once to 

 reject with disdain the teaching inculcated in the Origin of Species, 

 a teaching eagerly welcomed by that Teutonic "wearer of motley " 

 by whom, as Professor Cunningham well says, 7 Halophysetna and 

 Gastrophysema were " specially created," by the creator of Bathyhius, 

 and by that prolific Professor at Freiburg whom the destruction 

 by facts of some utterly gratuitous hypotheses, does not for a moment 

 deter from troubling us with others no whit less gratuitous than were 

 their predecessors. 



But to return to archetypal ideas and theories as to the nature 

 of the skull. In the first place exception must be taken to embryology 

 as the test. For, if we carry back such researches to the incipient 

 germ, we shall find no available characters for discrimination 

 at all, while diversities of interpretation of nascent structures are 

 almost always possible, and the meaning of initial changes must 

 be elucidated by the study of subsequent changes. 



Thus, Professor Huxley tells us,*^ as to Menobranchus, that " no 

 definite answer can be given " to the question whether the trabeculae 

 " grow into adjacent tissues as a tree pushes its roots into the soil," 

 or whether their apparent distinction does not " arise rather from a 

 chondrification of the pre-existing tissue in the immediate neighbour- 

 hood of the trabecular cartilage ? " 



Then, when ossification sets in, the meaning of the several ossific 

 centres, as they arise, must be interpreted by their later stages. How 



^ Readers interested in such questions may be referred to Proc. Zool. Soc, 1884, 

 p 462. 



"' Natural Science, September, 1892, p. 544. 

 8 Proc. Zool. Soc, 1S74, p. 199. 



