FROM LAMARCK TO ST. HILAIRE 269 



philosophic conception of the skeleton, we find that 

 the first idea of the metamorphosis of the osseous 

 forms ; that is, that all forms are but modifications, 

 more or less traceable, of one and the same type ; this 

 idea belongs to Goethe. 



Quite independently of either Cuvier, La- 

 marck, or Geoffroy — in fact, twenty-five years 

 before the FUlosophie Zoologique of 1809 was 

 published — Goethe made a brilliant anatomical 

 discovery in the separation of the two bones com- 

 posing tiie upper jaw of man, which he correctly 

 interpreted as proving man's anatomical kinship 

 and unity of type with the higher animal world. 

 He arrived at this discovery by comparison 

 of animal and human skulls of different ages. 

 Against the opinion of the most celebrated 

 anatomists of his time— Blumenbach, Camper, 

 and Sommering— he expressed his conviction of 

 the consistency of the osteological type in ani- 

 mals, ''from the simplest to the more complex, 

 from the small and cramped to the huge and ex- 

 tended." 



The harmony of the whole makes every creature 

 what it is, and man is man by the form and nature 

 of his upper jaw as well as by the form and nature 

 of the last phalanx of his little toe. Then again every 

 creature is but a tone, a modulation, of a great har- 

 mony, which must be studied as a whole and in all its 



