768 HUXLEY AND HIS WORK. 



followed. That sucli recognition greatly facilitates morphological con- 

 cepts is certain. But most of the further new features of this classifi- 

 cation have not received the approbation of naturalists generally. 



V. — The Vertebrate Theory of the Skull. 



Germany's great poet, Goethe, was "passionately devoted to the 

 natural sciences," but was " induced by the habit of his mind to search 

 for the general truths which give life to the dry bones of detail." In 

 the Jewish cemetery of Venice, a broken sheep's skull came under his 

 notice and he thought he recognized that it was made of modified ver- 

 tebra?. Another German, Oken, in the Hartz mountains, " stumbled 

 upon the blanched skull of a deer," and he was inspired with the idea 

 that " it is a vertebral column." Oken immediately proclaimed his idea 

 to the world. It found acceptance in many places and England's great 

 anatomist, Eichard Owen, took it up and carefully elaborated a new 

 form of it. Owen's modifications, dubbed the " archetype " of the skele- 

 ton, became popular in Britain and America, and elements of the skull 

 were described in terms indicating that they were u homotypes" with 

 appendages of vertebra, the nasals, for example, being styled the 

 neural spines of the nasal vertebra, the premaxillary the haemal spine 

 of the same vertebra, and the dentary of the lower jaw the haemal 

 spine of the frontal vertebra. But still more fanciful was the termi- 

 nology for the limbs, the anterior being allocated to the occipital ver- 

 tebra, and the scapula regarded as a pleuropophysis, the coracoid as a 

 haemapophysis, and the limb itself as a " diverging appendage." 



Strange as this conception may appear to the young who have only 

 been educated in modern methods, it had attractions for some, as I can 

 testify from personal experience. When a boy I made an enlarged 

 copy of the diagram republished in Carpenter's Physiology and colored 

 the neurapophyses blue and the hsemapophyses red. Later reflection led 

 me to the conclusion that an "archetype" should be more or less real- 

 ized, and if it were not, it had no place in nature. As the Owenian 

 archetype was at most only distantly approximated by specialized 

 fishes, it could not be a true archetype of the vertebrate skeleton as 

 such, however near it might represent the typical fish skeleton. Doubt- 

 less others were led by similar reasoning to discard the Owenian ideas, 

 yet they continued in favor among many. 



But in 1858, in a lecture on the Croonian foundation before the Eoyal 

 Society, with Owen himself in the chair, Huxley discoursed "on the 

 theory of the vertebral skull," and conclusively showed the inconsist- 

 ency of the archetypal conception with the facts of embryology and 

 development. After a recapitulation he confessed that he did " not per- 

 ceive how it is possible, fairly and consistently, to reconcile these facts 

 with any existing theory of the vertebrate composition of the skull, 

 except by drawing ad libitum upon the Deus ex machina of the specu- 

 lator — imaginary confluences, 'connations,' 'irrelative repetitions,' and 

 shirtings of position — by whose skillful application it would not be 



