THE STUDY OF STRUCTURE. 335 



other discovery, regarding which he wrote to Herder : 

 — " I must hasten to tell you of a piece of good 

 fortune that has happened to me. I have found 

 — neither gold nor silver, but what gives me inex- 

 pressible delight — the intermaxillary bone in man." 

 " I have such delight,'' he wrote to another, " dass 

 sich mir alle Eingeweide bewegen.^^ The reason 

 for his exuberant delight in proving the presence of 

 this little bone in front of the upper jaw was due 

 to his conviction of the unity of plan in vertebrate 

 skeletons. That man had no intermaxillary had 

 been regarded as a distinctive peculiarity ; but Goethe 

 was right in his conviction of the all-pervading simil- 

 itude of structure between man and beast. While 

 Goethe was quite independent in his discovery, it 

 should be noted that the name of Vicq d'Azyr must 

 also be associated with the bone in question. 



The two discoveries which we have noticed remain 

 as part of the framework of science, but the same 

 cannot be said of Goethe's vertebral theory of the 

 skull (which Oken also suggested). According to 

 this theory, which Goethe arrived at partly from a 

 study of the insect's body, evidently built up of a 

 series of rings or segments, and partly from the sight 

 of a crumbling sheep's skull which fell to pieces as 

 he disinterred it, the skull is formed of six modified 

 vertebrae.* The death-blow to this view, which pre- 

 vailed for a long time, was given by Keichert and 

 Ratke, Gegenbaur and Huxley, who showed that, al- 

 though the head is built up of a series of segments, 

 originally comparable to those of the trunk, this can- 



* It is a strange historical fact that a sheep's skull on 

 the Hartz Mountains led Oken to the same theory as the 

 sheep's skull in the Jewish cemetery in yenice had sug- 

 gested to Goethe. 



