THE ANNALS 
MAGAZINE OF NATURAL HISTORY. 
[THIRD SERIES. | 
No. 107. NOVEMBER 1866. 
XLV.—Outline of a Theory of the Skull and the Skeleton; being 
an Epitome of a Paper read before the Cambridge Philosophical 
Society, Feb. 26,1866. By Harry G. Szrxey, F.G.S., of 
the Woodwardian Museum in the University of Cambridge. 
By a theory of the skull I mean a way of presenting a set of 
well-known facts so that they explain themselves; for a theory 
should ever be a continuity of facts. 
The value and homology of bones varies so much with the 
theoretical views used to interpret them, that, with the number 
of cranial theories on record, it were hard clearly to describe a 
skull without attempting to co-ordinate the rival views of its 
structure. Differing in detail, these all affirm, and some attempt 
to prove, one side or other of the antithesis, that either the skull 
is a chain of vertebre or that it no more consists of a series of 
vertebree than the vertebral column consists of a series of skulls. 
There is much to be said in favour of both these views, from 
every consideration they involve. Every one is familiar with the 
beautiful way in which Professor Owen brought together brain 
and brain-case from the whole vertebrate province, till the con- 
viction dawned on his reader that a skull was but another name 
for the first four of an animal’s vertebree. Nor will Professor 
Huxley’s lucid demonstration be less remembered, reiterated 
through one vertebrate class after another till we willingly be- 
lieve, as he would have us, that a skull is a skull—a complex 
structure, with three segments forming one organ, a brain-case, 
and two segments forming a face, while sets of bones for special 
senses close up the eyes and the ears. To the human anatomist 
considering the human skull it may be a very trivial matter 
whether he accept one view or the other; but with the compa- 
rative anatomist, ever discovering new animals, and often only 
guided to their true affinities by the skull, different theories 
give a very different value to arrangements and bones which are 
Ann. & Mag. N. Hist. Ser.3, Vol, xviii. 2 
