314 
OWEN’S POSITION IN 
Bird’s Skull ; but it is devoted less to the deter- 
mination of “special” than of “general homo- 
logies ; ” it has, in fact, a much higher aim than 
the contemporary publication of the French anato- 
mist, in which we^seek in vain for any glimpse of 
those higher relations of the bones of the skull, 
the discovery of which has conferred immortality 
on the name of Okend ’ 
And the ‘ Conclusion ’ of the same work (pp. 
171-172) abounds in the sense of the Okenian 
philosophy. The explanation of the facts of mor- 
phology is sought in the ‘ principle of vegetative 
repetition ; ’ in the interaction of a ‘ general and 
all-pervading polarising force,’ with an ‘ adaptive 
or special organising force,’ identified with the 
Platonic tSea. Whether they be sound or un- 
sound, nothing can be more opposed to the 
Cuvierian tradition than speculations of this 
order. 
The ‘ Programm ’ to which these sympathetic 
references are made, opens with some sentences 
which are worth attention, since they furnish a 
typical example of the speculative procedure of 
the Natu 7 'philosophie school. 
‘ A vesicle ossifies, and it is a vertebra. A 
vesicle elongates into a tube, becomes jointed, 
ossifies, and it is a vertebral column. The tube 
^ There are even stronger treatise, Principes d’ Ostcologie 
expressions to the same effect comparde, published in 1855. 
in the French version of the 
