84 HUXLEY 



book in which Huxley demonstrates the physical and 

 psychical identity of man and the higher apes with a 

 completeness never before attempted, but the con- 

 sideration of some of the effects of that demon- 

 stration will have more fitting place in the next 

 chapter. 



Omitting any account of Huxley's minor discover- 

 ies, the last one of importance to be noted takes us 

 back to 1878. In that year, while he was Fullerian 

 Professor at the Royal Institution, he delivered a 

 lecture on the origin of the skull in vertebrates. 1 In 

 1806, Oken, a German naturalist of somewhat 

 dreamy type, when walking in the Hartz Forest, 

 picked up the dried skull of a sheep, and the idea 

 struck him that it was an expanded vertebral column. 

 The priority of idea was, apparently with justice, 

 claimed by Goethe, who saw in it a correlate to his 

 theory of the " transformation of plants " — i. <?., that 

 every part of a plant is made up of stem and leaf, 

 modified for the particular function it has to perform. 

 But what secured unquestioned belief in the view that 

 the skull " is formed of a series of expanded vertebrae 

 moulded together," was the support given to it by 

 Owen, "who was at that time the leading vertebrate 

 anatomist in England," and whose indorsement may 

 be in some measure explained by the seeming ac- 



1 Ante, p. 17. 



