CHAPTER VIII
TRANSCENDENTAL ANATOMY IN ENGLAND—RICHARD OWEN
Richard Owen is the epigonos of transcendental morphology; in him its guiding ideas find clear expression, and in his writings are no half-truths struggling for utterance.
Fig. 4.—Ideal Typical Vertebra. (After Owen.)
But he was, though a staunch transcendentalist, an eclectic of the older ideas current in his time; for he picked out what was best in the older systems—Cuvier's teleology, Geoffroy's principle of connections, Oken's idea of the serial repetition of parts. In particular, he assimilated the teaching of Cuvier, the great opponent of the transcendentalists, and reconciled it in part with his own transcendentalism. His main theoretical views are to be found in his volume On the Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton (London, 1848). The master-idea of the book is that the vertebrate skeleton consists of a series of comparable segments, each of which Owen calls a vertebra.
Fig 5.—Natural Typical Vertebra; Thorax of a Bird. (After Owen.)
His definition of a vertebra is, "one of those segments of the endo-skeleton which constitute the axis of the body, and the protecting canals of the nervous and vascular trunks" (p. 81). The parts of a typical vertebra are shown in [Fig. 4], which is copied from Owen's Fig. 14.