316 FROM THE GREEKS TO DARWIN 



the bottom of the scale. To fill this gap, the au- 

 thor, like Lamarck, supposes that there is a con- 

 tinuous spontaneous generation of the lowest 

 forms of life, of primordial nucleated vesicles, 

 the meeting-point between the organic and in- 

 organic ; this generation he believes to be an elec- 

 tro-chemical operation. 



Owen (1810-1892)^ 



Richard Owen, Darwin's junior by a year, 

 whose death marked the last of the old school, 

 was the leading comparative anatomist of the 

 w^orld in the period after Cuvier, with whom he 

 studied. He was not, however, a scientific suc- 

 cessor of Cuvier in a strict sense, but followed 

 also St. Hilaire and Oken in transcendental 

 anatomy and in a guarded acceptance of the 

 transmutation theory. From Oken and Goethe 

 he developed his famous, but now wholly dis- 

 carded, 'archetypal' theory of the skull, as de- 

 rived from the modifications of several successive 

 vertebrae; the idea of perfect archetypal type 

 forms as ancestral to modern, degenerate, or 

 vestigial types seems also to have been his central 

 thought in connection with Evolution. 



The vast range of Owen's knowledge in com- 



iSee Osborn: Richard Owen and the Evolution Movement. 



