THE ANCESTRY OF THE VERTEBRATES 507 



a real existence, it would have been the ancestor of the group in 

 the modern sense, but there is little to be found in the writings 

 of these early morphologists to suggest such a relationship, 

 and the archetype seems to have been considered a mere ab- 

 straction, a working hypothesis in definite architectural form, 

 employed for the purpose of facilitating comparison. There is 

 often indeed the idea that the archetype, non-existent in its per- 

 fection, forms a divinely constructed plan upon which the 

 Creator has modeled each member of a group of organisms, and 

 that Man is able to grasp and understand this plan through his 

 spiritual insight, a faculty akin to that of the Deity himself. 

 Says Goethe, " Sollte es denn eben unmoglich sein, da wir 

 einmal anerkennen, dass die schaffende Gewalt nach einem 

 allgemeinen Schema die vollkommeneren organischen Naturen 

 erzeugt und entwickelt, dieses Urbild, wo nicht den Sinnen, 

 doch dem Geiste darzustellen, nach ihm -als nach einer Norm 

 unsere Beschreibungen auszuarbeiten und, indem solche von 

 der Gestalt der verschiedenen Thiere abgezogen ware, die 

 verschiedensten Gestalten wieder auf sie zuruckzufuhren ? "* 



This employment of an hypothetical archetype for the com- 

 parison of organisms reached its culmination in the marvelous 

 structure reared by the English anatomist, Sir Richard Owen, 

 who first established his great fundamental conception of a 

 typical vertebra, and then described in terms of this all the 

 skeletal parts of every known vertebrate, including here not the 

 vertebral column alone but the skull and appendicular skeleton 

 as well. 



His diagram of a typical vertebra, reproduced here (Fig. 

 137), shows that he, too, as well as so many others, conceived 

 of the typical or primordial form as a symmetrical and perfect 



* " But should it then be impossible, when once we recognize that the 

 Creative Power has produced and developed the more completely organ- 

 ized natures after a general plan, for us to represent this Archetype, if 

 not to the senses, at least to the mind, to elaborate our descriptions in ac- 

 cordance with it as with a norm, and, since such archetypes were taken 

 from the forms of different animals, to refer the most varied forms back 

 to it again?" Johann Wolfgang Goethe, " Uber einen aufzustellenden 

 Typus zu Erleichterung der vergleichenden Anatomic," 1796. 



