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Show 288 ON THE STRUCTURE OF THE VERTEBHATE SKULIJ. from the articJe in the "Encyclopredia Bri.tan~lica" alr~ady c1· te d (s upra' , p. £'.J.. 81) , may not in1probably excite In other 1n1nds as much a tonishment as it has in mine:- "As to the question of the superiority of the deductive. ~ver the inductive method of philosophy, as illustrated by the wntlngs of Oken. his bold axiom that heat is but a Inode of motion of lio·ht a~d the idea broached in his essay on • Generation' (tso5 ), viz., that ' all the parts of higher animals are made up of an ao·gregate of Infusoria, or aggregated globular Monads,' are both of the same order as his proposition of the head being a repetition of the trunk, with its vertebrre and limbs. Science would have profited no more from the one idea without the subsequent experimental discoveries of Oersted and Faraday, or by the other, without the microscopical observations of Brown, Schleiden, and Schwann, than from· the third notion, without the inductive demonstration of the segmental constitution of the skull by Owen. It is questionable, indeed, whether in either case the discoverers of the true theories were excited to their labours, or in any way influenced, by the u priori guesses of Oken; more probable is it that the requisite researches and genuine deductions therefrom were the results of the correlated fitness of the stage of the science, and the gifts of its true cultivators at such particular stage."-P. 502. Thus does the moralist upon Goethe's supposed delinquencies think it just to depreciate the merits of Oken, and exalt his own, in the year 1858. But if he himself had not been "in any way influenced" by Oken, and if the " Programm " is a mere mass of " a priori guesses," how comes it that only three years before Mr. Owen could write thus?* "Oken, ce genie profond et penetrant, fut le premier qui entrevit la verite, guide par l'heureuse idee de l'arrangen1ent des os craniens en segn1ents, cmnme ceux du rachis) appeles vertebres.' And, after sundry extracts from Oken's "Programm," could continue:- " Ceci servira pour exemple d'un examen scrupuleux des * "Principes d'Osteologie comparee, ou Recherches sur 1' Archetype ot los Homologies du Squelette vertebre."-P. 155. 1855. 'l'HE THEORY OF THE VERTEBRATE SKULL. 289 faits, ~'une appreciation philosophique de leurs relations et analogies, en un ·mot de l' esprit dans lequel Oken deter1nine les relations vertebrales des os du crane."-P. 158. And again:- " Quand on commen9a a apprecier la verite de la generalisation ,d'Oken,_ on se ~a~pe~a, comme c'est !'habitude, que quelqu un ava1t eu un Idee a peu pres semblable. . . . . Mais toutes ces anticipations ne sauraient enlever a Oken le merite de la pren1iere proposition definie d'une theorie."P. 161. The space at present occupied by the proclamation of the weakness ?f the "Inora.l. sense" of Goethe may not unfitly be taken up, In the next editiOn of the "Encycloprodia Britannica " by the extrication of the author of the article "Oken," from t.l~e singular dilemma in which these citations place him. ~rhe fact is, that, so far from not having been "in any way influenced'' by Oken, Professor Owen's own contributions to this question are the merest Okenism, remanie. In the work I have cited, not a single fact, nor a single argument, can be found by which the doctrine of the segmentation of the skull is placed on a fir~er foundation than that built by Oken. Two novel speculations are indeed brought forward, the one of which confuses the petrosal (in the Cuvierian sense) of the lower Vertebrata with the homologue of the alisphenoid of Man, and, consequently, would, if adopted, throw the whole subject into hopeless chaos; while the other-the supposition that the fore limb is an appendage of the head-can only be explained by that entire want of any acquaintance with, or appreciation of the value of, embryology which all the writings of the same author display. II. The great works of Spix and Bojanus contain, apart from the theory which they attempted to establish, abundant evidence of the unity of composition of the bony skull, but it was Geoffroy St. Hilaire and, more especially, Cuvier, who demonstrated that unity of organization, apart from all hypotheses, 1nost thoroughly and completely. The fresher one's study of the writings of the wilder Okenians-the more one has u |
