Goethe and Oken 131 



in the Jews' cemetery at Venice, and, by way of a joke, 

 held it out to me as if he were offering me a Jew's 

 skull. I have made a great step in the formation of 

 animals." It is an interesting trait in Huxley's char- 

 acter, to find him zealous in defence of the reputation 

 of a great man, even although that man had been dead 

 more than half a century; bat it may be added that his 

 just zeal was at least stimulated by the fact that the 

 maligner of Goethe was Owen, the conduct of whom, 

 with regard to Darwin and Huxley, Huxley had had 

 just reason for resenting. 



The theory, then, which had dropped stillborn from 

 Goethe, but which Oken developed, was simply that 

 the skull consisted of a series of expanded vertebrae. 

 Each vertebra consists of a basal piece or centrum, the 

 anterior and posterior faces of which are closely applied 

 to the face of an adjoining vertebra, and of a bony arch 

 or ring which encloses and protects the nervous cord. 

 Oken supposed that there were four such vertebrae in 

 the skull, the centra being firmly fused and the arches 

 expanded to form the dome of the skull. Quite cor- 

 rectly, he divided the skull into four regions, corre- 

 sponding to what he called an ear vertebra, at the back, 

 through which the auditory nerves passed ; a jaw ver- 

 tebra, in the sphenoidal region, through which the 

 nerves to the jaws passed ; an eye vertebra in front, 

 pierced by the optic nerves, and again in front a nose 

 vertebra, the existence of which he doubted at first. 

 Quite rightly, he discriminated between the ordinary 

 bones of the skull and the special structures surrounding 

 the inner ear which he declared to be additions derived 

 from another source. So far it cannot be doubted that 

 the vertebral theory made a distinct advance in our 

 knowledge of the skull. It was to a certain extent, 



