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Analyses of Books . 
portion of Greek and Latin words in scientific terminology. We 
can fancy the expression of his face if he had ever encountered 
such terms as “ ardtiodadtyls ” and “ perissodaCtyls.” 
He also deserves, and is beginning to receive, due honour as 
the founder of the “ Congress of German Naturalists and Phy- 
sicians, ’ of which the British Association is a copy. 
We cannot conclude this brief notice of Herr Ecker’s inte- 
resting work without reference to one of Oken’s greatest disco- 
veries, which involved him in a dispute as to priority with the 
poet Goethe, and undoubtedly exercised a great and outwardly 
unfavourable influence upon his career. On entering upon his 
professorship at Jena (July 30, 1807) he published a small work 
which bears the title “ The Signification of the Skull-Bones,” 
and which gave a new direction to the doctrine of the morphology 
of the skeleton, by pointing out the homology between the skull 
and the vertebral column. It is evident that he had long enter- 
tained this idea, since as early as 1802 he had pronounced the 
organs of sensation to be merely a repetition of lower organs. 
In August, 1806, when taking a tour in the Harz in company 
with two students, he found by the Ilsenstein the bleached skull 
of a deer, and was at once struck with the analogy in question. 
He sent his work to Goethe, the “ curator” of the University of 
Jena, and he writes — “ This discovery pleased Goethe so that he 
invited me, in the Easter recess, 1808, to pay him a week’s visit 
in Weimar, which I did.” Nothing is known as to what passed 
at this interview, and it is remarkable, as Herr Ecker points out, 
that “ Goethe, to my knowledge at least, never mentions Oken, 
though he otherwise followed with great interest much less im- 
portant researches which bordered upon his own studies.” Six- 
teen years after this interview, in 1824, Goethe laid claim to the 
priority of the discovery in his “ Contributions to Morphology.” 
He asserts that in 1791 he found the skull of a sheep on the 
Lido, at Venice, and was struck with the analogy. He adds, 
still without any mention of Oken, that “ in 1807 this theory had 
been given to the public tumultuously and incompletely.” The 
flatterers of the great poet have actually gone so far as to accuse 
Oken of having stolen the idea from Goethe — a charge for which 
there is not the slightest foundation. The two men never met 
until after the publication of Oken’s work. No correspondence 
had passed between them, and Goethe had certainly not made 
his discovery public. The priority of publication and demon- 
stration undoubtedly belongs to Oken, and we fear that Goethe, 
though he made no explicit charges against his co-discoverer, 
cannot be acquitted of having tacitly sanctioned their propaga- 
tion by others. Hegel in particular had the indiscretion to say, 
without the shadow of proof, that Goethe had communicated his 
ideas to Oken (Hegel’s “ Werke,” vol. vii., seCt 1, p. 567 ; Berlin, 
1842). 
There was indeed, after the visit in 1808, a coolness between 
