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 ourseives 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,? Halophysema and 
Gastrophysema were “specially created,’ by the creator of Bathybius, 
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 trabecule 
‘“‘srow 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 
6 Readers interested in such questions may be referred to Proc. Zool. Soc., 1884, 
p. 462. 
7 NATURAL SCIENCE, September, 1892, p. 544. 
8 Proc. Zool. Soc., 1874, p. 199. 
