320 OWEN'S POSITION IN 



time, profiting by one set of its influences, limited 

 by another. It was Owen's limitation that he 

 occupied himself with speculations about the 

 1 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 

 Rathke, Reichert, Remak, Vogt, and others, the 

 venue of the great cause of the morphology of the 

 skeleton was removed from the court of com- 

 parative anatomy to that of embryology. 6 When 

 developmental investigation had proved that 

 even the segmentation of the vertebrate body is 

 not its primary condition ; that such segmentation 

 without founding it largely on embryology cannot 

 be traced throughout the cranial region ; that a 

 process of chondrification, or formation of carti- 

 laginous hard-parts, precedes ossification, and is 

 not the same in the skull as in the spinal column ; 

 that bones are not all similar in respect of their 

 mode of origin ; it was obvious that no satisfactory 

 theory of the skeleton could be attained without 

 taking these facts into serious consideration, and, 

 indeed, without founding it largely on embryology. 

 It would be a great mistake, however, to con- 



6 And even this appeal is not on the history of life on our 



final. We have still to look to planet, as evidenced by the facts 



palaeontology for confirmation or of palaeontology, however these 



contradiction of our deductions facts may be supplemented and 



from the facts of embryology. speculatively interpreted. 

 Biological evolution is based 



