NOMENCLATURE. 13 
Comparative science wants a general and comprehensive vision of the comparable designs of skeletons. 
Tt wants to know of the archetype from which they have been struck out in proportional variety ; but the form 
vertebra, should not be used as the telescope through which this vision of skeleton entirety is to be gained. We 
cannot comprehend the whole by the part, but if we continue to generalise upon the whole by such a part as 
the form vertebra instances, we shall view skeleton creation and the unity in variety only to the same effect 
that this condition of developed character has been ever seen, and that is through mystery. And perhaps it 
is this unproductive effort of demonstrating a whole quantity in a minus proportional of itself which 
distinguishes the foreign schools of anatomy from our own, and calls forth the remark from Carus, that, 
“ Philosophical osteology is not indebted for any progress to the English or Italians.” To which it may be 
added that there is far more science displayed in abandoning altogether the theme of philosophical unity, 
than in the attempt to demonstrate the quantity a+6, in a—é, the hyoid apparatus of an osseous fish in that 
of a Mammalian larynx ; the oary palm of a Cetaceous animal in the fore limb of an Apteryx, or the plus 
archetype of a spinal series in a vertebral quantity or minus figure.* 
Anatomical science has not as yet comprehended the design and completed model of the skeleton 
archetype, and henge has not established the recognition of that form to which it may refer variety for 
lucid explanation. In the infinitude of variety it still appears to be cast away, and the name and sound 
of unity is all it has as yet known of this quality of form. When we enter the museums of osteological 
collections, we do not fail to recognise the imposing transient form of unity, but it is unity in variety ; 
and when we make effort to withdraw ourselves from the trammels of nomenclature, and seek to know 
the essential meaning of this law of development, to question the existence of the figure of unity and the 
source of variety, we are soon forced to confess that it is upon skeleton forms as a sftitile and in mass that 
this law operates. Unity being the thing a+4, variety being. the thing a—d, we shall find that all skeleton 
designs entire, as well as all skeleton apparatus, whether between multitudinous species or between 
individuals of one species, vary by the differential law of subtracting quantity from original or plus uniformity. 
The one spinal chain of vertebral bones does not express the unexceptionable character of unity in 
any stronger light than do the skeleton forms entire speak of the same unity ; but the mind is compelled to 
grant that, as the skeleton designs of the four classes are comparable to each other as varieties fashioned 
of unity, so must the reason make effort to ‘interpret the form of unity from out of the figures of these 
same four classes viewed in the aggregate, and add those parts which appear to be wanting to the one 
form by drawing from the other form where they appear developed, and just as we would complete the circle 
for the semicircle, according to the proportions of another circle. 
When we are forced to acknowledge that degradation and metamorphosis of an archetype uniformity is 
the source of variety, then reason has a free licence to reconstruct the parts known to have suffered metamor- 
phosis in the one skeleton figure, according to the parts which stand as full archetype models in the design 
of another figure, and it is in this light that we shall be enabled to discover how vertebre are as parts 
remaining after the metamorphosis of completer archetypes; this must be the end and object of all 
comparative reasoning. If we are to take within the eye of reason the full vision of skeleton archetype 
.* “Magnitudes which coincide exactly with each other are equal. But thé part is lesser than the whole quantity, and 
therefore the part and the whole are unequals. Yet the whole contains proportionals equal and similar to all disconnected proportionals 
of a whole quantity.”’— Geometrical Axioms. 
