Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/811

O K E N 751 moreover, takes its starting-point from below, and conse quently that all of them pass parallel to each other ; " and that, " as in chemistry, where the combinations follow a definite numerical law, so also in anatomy the organs, in physiology the functions, and in natural history the classes, families, and even genera of minerals, plants, and animals present a similar arithmetical ratio." The Lehrbuch procured for Oken the title of Hofrath, or court-councillor. In 1812 he was appointed ordinary professor of the natural sciences. In 1816 he commenced the publication of his well-known periodical, entitled Isis, eine encyclopddische Zeitschrift, vorzilglich fur Naturgeschichte, veryleichende Anatomie, und Physiologie. In this journal appeared essays and notices not only on the natural sciences but on other subjects of interest ; poetry, and even comments on the politics of other German states, were occasionally admitted. This led to representations and remonstrances from the Governments criticized or impugned, and the court of Weimar called upon Oken either to suppress the Isis or resign his professor ship. He chose the latter alternative. The publication of the Isis at Weimar was prohibited. Oken made arrange ments for its issue at Rudolstadt, and this continued unin terruptedly until the year 1848. The independent spirit manifested by Oken excited his courtly enemies to harsher measures. An accusation was preferred against him as a member of a forbidden "secret democratic society" ; he stood his trial and was acquitted. He thereupon retired for a while into private life, occupying himself with the editorship of the Isis and with a series of natural-history manuals in which he considered that he had arranged for the first time the genera and species in accordance with the only true or physio-philosophical principles, stating briefly everything of vital importance respecting them, and maintaining that it was the first attempt to frame a truly scientific history of nature. In 1821 Oken promulgated in his Isis the first idea of the annual general meetings of the German naturalists and medical practitioners, which happy idea was realized in the following year, when the first meeting was held at Leipsic. They have been continued ever since in Germany; and similar annual scientific gatherings have been origin ated in other countries. The British Association for the Advancement of Science was at the outset avowedly organ ized after the German or Okenian model. In 1828 Oken resumed his original humble duties as privat - decent in the newly - established university of Munich, and soon afterwards he was appointed ordinary professor in the same university. In 1832, on the proposal by the Bavarian Government to transfer him to a professor ship in a provincial university of the state, he resigned his appointments and left the kingdom. Switzerland has the honour of affording the final place of refuge, with means of an independent pursuit of science, to this philosophic and patriotic naturalist. Oken was appointed in 1833 to the professorship of natural history in the then recently-established university of Zurich. There he continued to reside, fulfilling his professional duties and promoting the progress of his favourite sciences, until his death in the seventy-second year of his age (llth August 1851). All Oken s writings are eminently deductive illustrations of a foregone and assumed principle, which, with other philosophers of the transcendental school, he deemed equal to the explanation of all the mysteries of nature. According to him, the head was a repetition of the trunk a kind of second trunk, with its limbs and other appendages ; this sum of his observations and comparisons few of which he ever gave in detail ought always to be borne in mind in comparing the share taken by Oken in homological anatomy with the progress made by other cultivators of that philo sophical branch of the science. The idea of the analogy between the skull, or parts of the skull, illustration of the mystical system of Schelling the "all-in-all" and < all-in-every-part. " From the earliest to the latest of Oken s writings on the subject, " the head is a repetition of the whole trunk with all its systems : the brain is the spinal cord ; the cranium is the vertebral column ; the mouth is intestine and abdomen ; the nose is the lungs and thorax ; the jaws are the limbs ; and the teeth the claws or nails." Spix, in his folio CepJutlogenesis (1813), richly illustrated comparative craniology, but presented the facts under the same transcendental guise ; and Cuvier ably availed him self of the extravagances of these disciples of Schelling to cast ridi cule on the whole inquiry into those higher relations of parts to the archetype which Professor Owen has called "general honiologies." The vertebral theory of the skull had practically disappeared from anatomical science when the labours of Cuvier drew to their close. In Owen s Archetype and Homologics of the Vertebrate Skele ton the idea was not only revived but worked out for the first time inductively, and the theory rightly stated, as follows : " The head is not a virtual equivalent of the trunk, but is only a portion, i.e., certain modified segments, of the whole body. The jaws are tlie haemal arches of the first two segments ; they are not limbs of the head " (p. 176). Vaguely and strangely, however, as Oken had blended the idea with his a priori conception of the nature of the head, the chance of appropriating it seems to have overcome the moral sense of Goethe, unless indeed the poet deceived himself. Comparative osteology had early attracted Goethe s attention. In 1786 he published at Jena his essay Ucber den Zwischcnkicferknochen dcs Menschen und der Thiere, showing that the intermaxillary bone existed in man as well as in brutes. But not a word in this essay gives the remotest hint of his having then possessed the idea of tho vertebral analogies of the skull. In 1820, in his Morpholoc/ie, he first publicly stated that thirty years before the date of that publi cation he had discovered the secret relationship between the verte brae and the bones of the head, and that he had always continued to meditate on this subject. The circumstances under which the poet, in 1820, narrates having become inspired with the original idea are suspiciously analogous to those described by Oken in 1807, as producing the same effect on his mind. A bleached skull is accidentally discovered in both instances : in Oken s it was that of a deer in the Harz forest ; in Goethe s it was that of a sheep picked up on the shores of the Lido, at Venice. It may be assumed that Oken, when a privat-docent at Gottingen in 1806, knew nothing of this unpublished idea or discovery of Goethe, and that Goethe first became aware that Oken had the idea of the vertebral relations of the skull when he listened to the intro ductory discourse in which the young professor, invited by the poet to Jena, selected this very idea for its subject. It is incredible that Oken, had he adopted the idea from Goethe, or been aware of an anticipation by him, should have omitted to acknowledge the source should not rather have eagerly embraced so appropriate an opportunity of doing graceful homage to the originality and genius of his patron. The anatomist having lee .tired for an hour plainly unconscious of any such anticipation, it seems hardly less incredible that the poet should not have mentioned to the young lecturer his previous conception of the vertebro-cranial theory, and the singular coinci dence of the accidental circumstance which he subsequently alleged to have produced that discovery. On the contrary, Goethe permits Oken to publish his famous lecture, with the same unconscious ness of any anticipation as when he delivered it ; and Oken, in the same state of belief, transmits a copy to Goethe, who thereupon honours the professor with special marks of attention and an invita tion to his house. No hint of any claim of the host is given to the guest ; no word of reclamation in any shape appears for some years. In Goethe s Tagcs- und Jahrcs-Hefte, he refers to two friends, Reimer and Voigt, as being cognizant in 1807 of his theory. AVhy did not one or other of these make known to Oken that he had been so anticipated? "I told my friends to keep quiet," writes Goethe in 1825 ! Spix, in the meanwhile, in 1815, contributes his share to the development of Oken s idea in his Ccphalogcncsis. Ulrich follows in 1816 with his Schildkrdtenschddel ; next appears the contribution, in 1818, by Bojanus, to the vertebral theory of the skull, amplified in the Paragon to that anatomist s admirable Anatome Testudinis Europaese, (1821). And now for the first time, in 1818, Bojanus, visiting some friends at AVeimar, there hears the rumour that his friend Oken had been anticipated by the great poet. He communicates it to Oken, who, like an honest man, at once published the statement made by Goethe s friends in the Isis of that year, offering no reflexion on the poet, but restricting him self to a detailed and interesting account of the circumstances under which he himself had been led independently to make his discovery, when wandering in 1806 through the Harz. It was enough for him thus to vindicate his own claims ; he abstains from any comment reflecting on Goethe, and maintained the same blame-