The evolution of man: a popular exposition of the principal points of human ontogeny and phylogenyFrom the German of Ernst Haeckel . o under-stand how it can be merely the modified anterior portion ofthe vertebral column. It is a complex, capacious bonystructure, consisting of no less than twenty bones, diflTering widely in form and size. Seven ofthese skull-bones constitute thespacious case which encloses thebrain, and in which we distinguishthe strong, massive floor of the skull(basis cranii) below, and theboldly arched roof of the skull(fornix cranii) above. The otherthirteen bones form the
The evolution of man: a popular exposition of the principal points of human ontogeny and phylogenyFrom the German of Ernst Haeckel . o under-stand how it can be merely the modified anterior portion ofthe vertebral column. It is a complex, capacious bonystructure, consisting of no less than twenty bones, diflTering widely in form and size. Seven ofthese skull-bones constitute thespacious case which encloses thebrain, and in which we distinguishthe strong, massive floor of the skull(basis cranii) below, and theboldly arched roof of the skull(fornix cranii) above. The otherthirteen bones form the facialskull, which especially provides the bony envelopes ofthe higher sense-organs, and at the same time as the jaw-skeleton, encircles the entrance to the intestinal lower jaw (usually regarded as the twenty-firstskull-bone) is jointed to the skull-floor, and behind this,embedded in the roots of the tongue, we find the tongue-bone, which, like the lower jaw, has originated from thegiU-arches, together with a portion of the lower arch, whichoriginally developed as skull-ribs from the ventral sideof the Fig. 264.—Human skull,from the rig-ht side. VERTEBRAL THEORY OF THE SKULL. 293 Altliough, therefore, the developed skull of the higherVertebrates, in its peculiar form, its very considerable size,and its complex structure, seems to have nothing incommon with ordinary vertebrse^ yet the old comparativeanatomists at the close of the eighteenth century correctlybelieved that the skull is originally merely a series ofmodified vertebrae. In 1790, Goethe picked up out of thesand of the Jews burying-ground among the downs nearVenice, a dismembered skuD of a sheep; he at once per-ceived that the face bones (like the three vertebrae of theback of the skull) are also derivable from vertebrse. And,in 1806, Oken (without knowing of Goetlies discovery), atIlsenstein, on the way to the Brocken, found a beautifullybleached skull of a hind; the thou Mi t flashed throu
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