i893- OWEN. 19 



recent contributions to science, have failed to refer to the work and 

 the hypothesis of their aged and illustrious compatriot. Yet in many 

 respects he most certainly anticipated the ideas of the Freiburg 

 Professor, 2 as we have before been careful to point out. It is, how- 

 ever, not so much Owen's hypothesis with respect to virgin repro- 

 duction that we desire here to refer to, as to that concerning his ideal 

 generalisations with respect to the structure of vertebrate animals. 



At the British Association meeting of 1846, and in his work on 

 the Anatomy of Fishes, published in the same years, he put forward 

 views which were fully developed in his work entitled " On the Arche- 

 type and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton," published* in 1848, 

 and further illustrated in his book, " On the Nature of Limbs, "-^ on 

 the frontispiece of which the human and bovine structures are repre- 

 sented in juxtaposition, much as the skeletons of man and horse 

 have been recently placed in juxtaposition by Sir Richard Owen's 

 most able and indefatigable successor in the directorship of the 

 British Museum of Natural History. 



Owen's views were essentially those of Oken, as he lets his readers 

 very plainly know. At page 73 of his work on " The Archetype," 

 speaking of the vertebrate theory of the skull, he says : — " The gifted 

 and deep-thinking naturalist, Oken, obtained the first clue to this dis- 

 covery by the idea of the arrangement of the cranial bones of the 

 skull into segments, like the vertebrae of the trunk. He informs us 

 that walking one day in the Hartz forest, he stumbled upon the 

 bleached skull of a deer, picked up the partially dislocated bones, 

 and, contemplating them for a while, the truth flashed across his 

 mind, and he exclaimed, ' It is a vertebral column ! ' " 



Sir Richard Owen's notion was that the skull consists of 

 four vertebrae, with sense organs at the anterior part of each of 

 its four osseous rings. The ear-capsule, in front of the first of the 

 four (the occipital vertebra) ; the nerve ministering to taste in front 

 of the second, or hinder sphenoidal vertebra ; the organ of sight 

 at the front of the third cranial (anterior sphenoidal) vertebra ; and 

 that of smell at the anterior part of the fourth or ethmoidal vertebra. 

 He clearly shows (p. 74) how in all this he had been anticipated by 

 Oken, and, on the next page, adds : " This will serve as an 

 example of the close observation of facts, the philosophical associa- 

 tion of their relations and analogies, and, in a word, of the spirit in 

 which Oken determines the vertebral relations of the cranial 



bones " Reverting to the petrosal, Oken thus beautifully 



and clearly enunciates its essential nature and homology : — ' You 

 will say I have forgotten the part petrosa. No ! it seems not to 

 belong to a vertebra, as such ; but to be a ' sense-organ,' in which 



2 In the number of Nature of November 14, 1889. 



'^ By Longman, Brown, Green and Longman. * By John Van Voorst. 



^ Also published by John Van Voorst. 



C 2 



