CHAT. VTIL] LIKENESSES IN ANIMALS AND PLANTS. 255 



admit that it has been the occasion of an important scientific 

 advance, through the efforts it occasioned to support, to 

 modify, or to refute it. According to Professor Owen s 

 hypothesis, the skull of every backboned animal, from man 

 to the cod-fish, was really made up of four modified vertebra, 

 each being provided with an inferior arch, like those which 

 in the trunk are formed by the ribs. The skeleton of every 

 existing vertebrate animal was represented as being formed 

 from some modification of an ideal archetypal skeleton, 

 which was again represented as composed of a series of ideal 

 archetypal vertebrae. This notion for a time met with very 

 general acceptance, but was, ere long, attacked, as being in 

 consistent with the facts of development. It was said that if 

 the skull was made up of modified vertebrae, its vertebrate 

 character should be plainest in its earliest and least modified 

 stages; and that yet such stages had no resemblance to 

 vertebra at all. Indeed, it was triumphantly shown that, as 

 soon as the backbone begins to be a backbone, the skull 

 begins to be something very different. In fact, that the skull 

 is never segmented, as is the primitive vertebral column, but 

 mainly consists, in its earlier stage, of a mass of cartilage, 

 from which two cartilaginous rods (the trabeculse cranii) ex 

 tend forwards along the base of the brain-case, quite unlike 

 anything found in the incipient vertebral column. Yet other 

 suggestions were made by Professor Seeley and by Mr. Herbert 

 Spencer, to account mechanically (by the necessary action 

 of pressure and strains on a frequently flexed, elongated 

 cylindrical body) for the simultaneous existence of a seg 

 mented backbone and a non-segmented skull. Finally, a 

 flood of ridicule and sarcasm was poured on the vertebrate 

 theory of the skull, and the doctrine of archetypal ideas was 

 supposed to be once for all disposed of by means of the 

 hypothesis of evolution. Mr. Darwin s Natural Selection 

 was lauded as having given the coup de grace to such fancies ; 

 and, lastly, appeared Pangenesis, to slay the slain, and to 

 make fortuitous compounds of atoms occupy the vacant 

 thrones of the deposed prototypal divine ideas. Evolution 



