30 The Science of Life. 



anatomy, useful as it often was in stimulating both 

 research and thought, Cuvier had no sympathy. This 

 should be borne in mind when we consider his antagon- 

 istic attitude to men like Lamarck, Etienne Geoffrey St. 

 Hilaire, and Goethe. 



Diverse opinions are held as to the value of Goethe's 

 morphological work, but, as Geddes says, "that he 

 discerned and proclaimed, and that more clearly than 

 any of his predecessors or contemporaries, the funda- 

 mental idea of all morphology the unity which underlies 

 the multifarious varieties of organic form, and that he 

 systematically applied this idea to the interpretation x>f 

 the most important, most complex, and most varied 

 animal and vegetable structures is unquestionable". 

 " Independently of Vicq d'Azyr, he discovered the human 

 premaxillary bone ; independently of Oken, he proposed 

 the vertebral theory of the skull ; and before Savigny, he 

 discerned that the jaws of insects were the limbs of the 

 head." 



Of greater influence than Goethe, however, was 

 Etienne Geoffrey St. Hilaire, author of the Philosophic 

 Anatomique (1818-1823), who elaborated and exagger- 

 ated the doctrine of unity of type. Tainted by the 

 transcendentalism of the Naturphilosophie, he is perhaps 

 more memorable for his intentions than for his achieve- 

 ments, but he was the first expert comparative anatomist 

 who was at the same time an evolutionist. In his con- 

 troversy with Cuvier before the Academy of Sciences in 

 Paris (1830), as to the unity of structure which he sup- 

 posed to obtain between cuttle-fishes and vertebrates, he 

 was utterly defeated; but the defeat, as subsequent 

 progress soon showed, was rather as to the letter than 

 as to the spirit. 



Owen (1804-1892) links Cuvier to Huxley and Gegen- 

 baur, occupying a strange midway position ; on the one 



Richard hand, extremely conservative and unappre- 



Owen. ciative of Darwinism; on the other hand, 

 really believing in the derivation of species from one 

 another. 



Beginning with the monumental Descriptive and Illus- 

 trated Catalogue of the Physiological Series of Compara- 



