2i4 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. I. No. 8. 



ing the labors of Cuvier into accovint. Al- 

 though Owen stands on ground wholly his 

 o^mi, he was ever willing to acknowledge 

 the debt which he owed to Cuvier." 



The name of Owen will ever be associated 

 with those of Oken, Goethe, Spix, and Carus, 

 or the school of transcendental anatomy. 

 The discussion by Huxley of Owen's work on 

 the archetype of the vertebrate skeleton is 

 handled in his peculiarly trenchant and 

 clear-minded way, and yet his criticisms are 

 genial, just and broad. It should be re- 

 membered that Owen's work ' On the Ai'che- 

 type and Homologies of the Vertebrate 

 Skeleton ' appeared in 1848, over ten years 

 before the appearance of the ' Origin of 

 Species,' and at a period when many minds 

 in the scientific world were tinged more or 

 less deeply with the spirit of the German 

 and French transcendental school of an- 

 atomy. As Huxley eloquently exj^resses it, 

 " The ablest of us is a child of his time, profit- 

 ing by one set of its influences, Umited by 

 another. It was Owen's limitation that he 

 occupied himself with speculations about the 

 ' Archetype ' some time before the work of 

 the embryologists began to be appreciated 

 in this country. It had not yet come to be 

 understood that, after the publication of the 

 investigations of Kathke, Reichert, Remak, 

 Vogt and others, the venue of the great cause 

 of the morpology of the skeleton was re- 

 moved from the court of comparative an- 

 atomy to that of embryology." He then 

 adds : "It would be a great mistake, how- 

 ever, to conclude that Owen's labours in the 

 field of morphology were lost, because they 

 have jdelded little fruit of the kind he 

 looked for. On the contrary, they not only 

 did a great deal of good by awakening at- 

 tention to the higher problems of morphol- 

 ogy in this country ; but they were of much 

 service in clarifying and improving anato- 

 mical nomenclature, especially in respect of 

 the vertebral region." 



As regards the vertebrate theory of the 



skull, perhaps the last word has not been 

 said, if traces of vertebrae still, as is alleged^ 

 appear in certain of the shai'ks. 



If Huxley by his destructive criticism has 

 destroj^ed, or seemed to have destroyed this 

 theory, the ghost is apparently not wholly 

 laid. The more ideal constructive, German 

 minds, as Gegenbaur and others, claim that 

 the adult skull is in a degree segmented, as 

 evinced by the serial arrangement of the 

 nerves, as well as of the branchial arches. 

 Though Wiedersheim states* that " the at- 

 tempt to explain the adult skull as a series 

 of vertebrae fails completely," adding, " it is 

 a case of protovertebrte only," he says in a 

 foot-note that Rosenberg has, however, 

 shown that in a shark (Carchcmas glaueus), 

 " the portion of the cranium lying between 

 the exit of the vagus and the vertebral col- 

 u^mn is clear Ij^ composed of three vertebrre." 

 Gadow finds four vertebrte in embryos of 

 Carcharias, while Sagemehl has found a 

 somewhat similar modification in Ganoids. 

 It would seem that the segmentation of the 

 head observed in the embrj^o of vertebrates, 

 and probably inherited ft'om their vermian 

 ancestors, has been obliterated in the adults 

 by adaptation, but that ti-aces may have 

 survived in certain sharks and Ganoids. 



Finally, it must be conceded that though 

 it is the fashion of the younger men to 

 characterize Owen as a comparative anato- 

 mist of the old school, and now quite overr 

 shadowed by the scientific leaders of the 

 present generation, the kindly and dis- 

 criminating judgment of the great English 

 anatomist and essaj-ist we have just quoted, 

 will undoubtedly be sustained by many 

 coming generations. Owen's place in na- 

 tural science, in many respects an unique 

 one, will be among the greatest anatomists 

 of the first half of our ceuturj\ His name 

 will bridge over the gap between Cuvier, 

 and the embryologists and morphologists 



Elements of the Comparative Anatomy of Verte- 

 brates, p. 56. 



