20 NATURAL SCIENCE. JAN., 
the ear-nerve loses itself; and therefore as distinct an organ from a 
vertebral element as is any other viscus, or as is the eye-hole itself.’ 
Although Oken does not in this essay formally admit a fourth 
vertebra anterior to the eye vertebra, he recognises the vertebral 
structure as being carried out rudimentarily or evanescently by the 
vomer . . . or the nasal bones.” 
Now we need hardly say that we do not give this citation with 
any intention of implying that the views of either Oken or Owen are 
true; but merely to show that the English naturalist did justice to 
his German predecessor—even to his suggestions with respect to the 
vomer and nasals, which are just those which Sir Richard Owen 
advocated. 
In the present day both Oken’s and Owen’s archetypes have be- 
come obsolete, and we suppose no one now maintains them. Never- 
theless, when they were first promulgated here, they produced no 
slight effect, they drew many thoughtful minds towards questions of 
biology, and they roused an antagonism which has also led to 
much valuable work. We believe them to have been, in these 
different ways, very serviceable to science, but we also think that they 
embodied, or were the mistaken outcome of, some deep and 
very significant truths which are, in general, far too little appreciated, 
a wave of sentiment, and the influence of a party (which could do 
much to make or mar a young man’s progress), having combined to 
indispose many minds towards a dispassionate appreciation of them. 
Personally, well disposed as we have always been to Owen, the 
Hunterian Professor, on account of much courtesy and kindness 
shown to us by him, we never accepted his representations in any 
detail, and were quickly convinced that he was quite mistaken as to 
his ‘‘ Petrosal”’ in the lower Vertebrates. Although adopted by not 
a few persons, some of his views invited hostile criticism, and were 
soon attacked as being inconsistent, as they obviously were, with the 
facts of development. It was urged that the skull was made up 
of modified vertebra. Its vertebrate character should be plainest 
in its earliest and least modified stages, and yet such stages had 
no resemblance to vertebre at all. It was also pointed out that 
basilar cartilage and trabecul# cranii were unlike anything to be 
found in the incipient vertebral column, the segmentation of which 
was sufficiently accounted for by the necessary action of pressures 
and strains on any frequently flexed cylindrical body. A flood of 
ridicule and sarcasm was poured on Owen’s hypothesis, and the 
doctrine of archetypal ideas was supposed to have received its coup 
de grace from the theory of ‘‘ Evolution,” and above all, from that of 
‘« Natural Selection.”’ 
But Sir Richard Owen did much more than propound a modified 
Okenian theory of the skeleton, and indeed it would be a great in- 
justice (an injustice which, nevertheless, has been ruthlessly per- 
petrated) to represent his theory as meve Okenism ; for Owen gives no 
