Richard Owen's Vertebrate Archetype

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Richard Owen's Vertebrate Archetype
Author(s): Nicolaas A. Rupke
Source: Isis, Vol. 84, No. 2 (Jun., 1993), pp. 231-251
Published by: University of Chicago Press on behalf of History of Science Society
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Richard Owen's Vertebrate
Archetype
By Nicolaas A. Rupke*
THE VERTEBRATE ARCHETYPE (from the Greek arkhe, "original," and tupos,
"imprinted image") is one of the most fascinating constructs of what has been
called the "morphological period" in the history of biology (approximately 1800-
1860). It represented the fullest expression of a belief in the fundamental relatedness,
if not of all organisms, at least of all animals with endoskeletons. Moreover, as
Darwin scholars have long recognized, the vertebrate archetype provided a direct
stepping-stone to the notion of evolutionary ancestors.' To us, the concept of an
archetype has echoes from Plato's theory of ideas to Carl Jung's notion of pervasive
cultural symbols in our collective unconscious. During the late nineteenth century a
theory of archetypesw as introducedi nto Old Testamentp hilology, too, by the Gottingen
theologian Paul Anton de Lagarde, who maintained that all manuscripts of the He-
brew Bible go back to a single, authoritative text from the early part of the second
century A.D.
In mid-Victorian times, however, the archetype notion above all connoted ver-
tebrate morphology and was closely associated with Richard Owen's book On the
Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton (Figure 1). In fact, the ver-
tebrate archetype is Owen's most enduring and most widely acknowledged claim to
fame. It formed the centerpiece of his homological research program, embodying
his synthesis of biological theory in which organic structures were explained pri-
marily by their morphological relationships, and only secondarily by their functions.
Owen's On the Archetype was the fruit of his work on the catalogue of the os-
teological collections in the Hunterian Museum. His systematic classification and
interpretationo f the vast amount of skeletal material at his disposal, not only in the
Hunterian collections but also in those of other British and Continental museums,
represented the culmination of the morphological tradition, at least in osteology, and
* History of Ideas Program, Institute of Advanced Studies, Australian National University, Canberra,
ACT 2601, Australia.
I warmly thank Roy M. MacLeod, Renato G. Mazzolini, John A. Passmore, and Phillip R. Sloan
for their constructive suggestions.
' The designation "morphological period" was introduced in J. V. Carus, Geschichte der Zoologie
bis auf Joh. Maller und Charl. Darwin (Munich, 1872), pp. 573-726. It was given wider currency in
J. T. Merz, A History of European Scientific Thought in the Nineteenth Century (1904; New York:
Dover, 1965), Vol. 2, pp. 200-275. On the vertebrate archetype as a stepping-stone see, e.g., Dov
Ospovat, The Development of Darwin's Theory: Natural History, Natural Theology, and Natural Se-
lection, 1838-1859 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981), pp. 146-148.
Isis, 1993, 84: 231-251
(C1993 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.
0021-1753/93/8401-0001$0 1.00
231
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232 NICOLAAS A. RUPKE
2
Figure 1. RichardO wen (1804-1892). Lithograph( 1850) by T. H. Maguire.( Courtesy Wellcome
InstituteL ibraryL, ondon.)
drew on the type-concept work of both an older and a contemporary generation of
colleagues. Significant in Owen's intellectual development was, for example, Georges
Cuvier's notion of four basic types, and also Karl Ernst von Baer's belief in four
basic developmental plans. In Britain, Martin Barry was an early advocate of the
".4unitoyf type." In his book Owen discussed in extenso the connections of his work
with that of many of his predecessors. In the secondary literature, too, these con-
nections have been examined,2 and in some detail as early as E. S. Russell's classic
Form and Function (1 916). By now, the morphology of Owen's vertebrate archetype
and its importance for his definition of "analogy" versus "homology" are to a large
extent familiar ground; the purpose of this paper is not to go over it again but,
instead, to examine the interpretationO wen placed upon his archetype "discovery."
Leading up to and facilitating this examination is a discussion of two further,
supposedly Owenian features of the vertebrate archetype, namely, the term and the
figure. Thus the following questions will be addressed: Where lay the origins of the
anatomical use of the term archetype, where those of the visual representation of
the archetypal vertebrate, and where those of its philosophical interpretation as a
2 See, e.g., Bernard Balan's impressive L'ordre et le temps: L'anatomie comparee et l'histoire des
vivants au XIXe siecle (Paris: Vrin, 1979).
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RICHARD OWEN'S VERTEBRATE ARCHETYPE 233
Platonic idea? Moreover, was there a sociopolitical motive behind Owen's formu-
lation of a vertebrate archetype? Is Adrian Desmond right in arguing that Owen's
Platonist archetype affirmed an upper-class belief in noble ancestry and that it was
constructed to wrest control of morphology from a group of materialist radicals who
advocated the notion of evolutionary ancestors because this notion meshed well with
their plebeian origins?3
Several of Owen's projects were patronized by a circle of Oxbridge friends who
advocated a functionalist epistemology. This, after all, strengthened the Paleyan de-
sign argument of natural theology. By contrast, the archetype work and, more com-
prehensively, Owen's homological research program took place in the context of a
group of London colleagues educated in Edinburgh. These men looked to the Con-
tinent for innovative approaches, and they borrowed a formalist epistemology that
had become popular among the German Romantic naturalists. Whereas the gener-
ation of Buffon and Linnaeus had been primarily concerned with the description and
classification of individual species, the Romantic naturalists sought to establish the
relatedness of organic forms and to express this in the delineation of one or more
morphological types. The different schools and research programs, such as the Kant-
ian Gottingen school and the Schelling-influenced Jena school, shared a belief in the
importance of mind and mental ideas that transcend empirical reality and constitute
the unifying principles or logic behind nature's phenomena.4 This infusion of Ro-
mantic, idealist belief into the study of early nineteenth-century biology produced
what has been called "transcendentalm orphology." In its most mundane form, this
was the belief that organic diversity, as present in the myriad of different species,
can be subsumed under one or a few ideal types. The archetype notion merged Ow-
en's work with these contemporary currents of idealist philosophy and weakened his
link with Oxbridge natural theology.5
Although Owen published on the ideal vertebra as early as 1840 (the paper was
delivered in 1838), no fully fledged definition of an archetypal skeleton was pre-
sented to the public until a series of publications that began with a two-part report
to the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), delivered on 17
and 21 September 1846. The first part was entitled "On the Homologies of the Bones
Collectively Called 'Temporal' in Human Anatomy," the second "On the Vertebrate
Structure of the Skull." There is no evidence that Owen used the word archetype in
delivering his report; in the sense of an abstract anatomical plan, the term appeared
for the first time in Owen's writings in the published version of the two-part BAAS
report, entitled "On the Archetype and Homologies of the VertebrateS keleton" (1847).
Until then-for example, in Lectures on Comparative Anatomy and Physiology of
3See Adrian Desmond, Archetypes and Ancestors: Palaeontology in Victorian London, 1850-1875
(London: Blond, 1982), p. 202 and passim; and Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology,
Medicine, and Reform in Radical London (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1989), p. 216 and passim.
4 See Timothy Lenoir, "The Gottingen School and the Development of Transcendental Naturphilo-
sophie in the Romantic Era," Studies in History of Biology, 1981, 5:111-205. The Jena school has not
yet received the same scholarly attention.
'
On transcendental morphology in Britain see Philip F. Rehbock, The Philosophical Naturalists:
Themes in Early Nineteenth-Century British Biology (Madison: Univ. Wisconsin Press, 1983). The clash
between "function" and "form" in Paris is well described in Toby A. Appel, The Cuvier-Geoffroy
Debate: French Biology in the Decades before Darwin (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987).
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234 NICOLAAS A. RUPKE
Vertebrate Animals, some of which were delivered as late as 1846-he used the
expressions general type and fundamental type.6 Nor did the BAAS report of 1847
contain the actual sketch of the vertebrate archetype. This appeared for the first time
in 1848, when the report was published in book form. Also entitled On the Archetype
and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton, the book included additional plates and
thirty pages of new text. Owen first put forward the philosophical interpretation of
the archetype as a Platonic idea in his Royal Institution lecture of 1849, published
as On the Nature of Limbs, and most explicitly in the Principes d'oste'ologie com-
paree of 1855, a revised translation of On the Archetype.
THE TERM ARCHETYPE
Not long after the appearance of On the Archetype, in 1848, a priority dispute de-
veloped over the osteological application of the term archetype. Joseph Maclise, a
graduate of London University, pointed out in his entry on the skeleton for Robert
Todd's Cyclopaedia of Anatomy and Physiology that the word had been "first intro-
duced by me in the study of comparative osteology." In an article in the Lancet,
"On the Nomenclature of Anatomy (Addressed to Professors Owen and Grant),"
which appeared on 14 March 1846, Maclise had indeed discussed the possibility of
"an original or archetype structure, from which the endo-skeleton designs are struck,
and to which they are comparable."7
In his response to Maclise, Owen did not counterclaim priority; this is sufficient
reason to believe that the introduction in transcendental morphology of the term ar-
chetype, defined in relation to the vertebrate skeleton, can be dated 14 March 1846
and assigned to Joseph Maclise. The Oxford English Dictionary, in attributing first
usage to Roderick Murchison in 1849, is multiply wrong. Yet Owen refused to honor
Maclise's priority, for several reasons. One was that the term did not constitute a
new word, but could be found "in Johnson's and other dictionaries, as the original
or pattern of which any resemblance is made." Owen himself had used archetype
as early as 1832, although in a different sense; in his Memoir on the Pearly Nautilus,
he characterizedt he nautilus as the living archetype of its extinct relatives, employing
the word as synonymous with what we today might call a "type specimen." In both
the British and Continental literature on anatomy, too, the word archetype had been
in use, although in a nontechnical and loosely defined, Platonist sense.8
A second reason for Owen's refusal to acknowledge Maclise was that the two
6 For an early publication on the ideal vertebra see Richard Owen, "A Description of a Specimen of
the Plesiosaurus Macrocephalus, Conybeare, in the Collection of Viscount Cole, M.P., D.C.L., F.G.S.,
etc.," Transactions of the Geological Society of London, 2nd ser., 1840, 5:515-535. An account of
Owen's two-part report appeared in Athenaeum, 19 Sept. 1846, pp. 968-969, and 26 Sept. 1846, pp.
1004-1005. For the first use of the term archetype in the sense that concerns us here see Owen, "On
the Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton," Report of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science: Southampton, 1846, pp. 169-340, on pp. 339-340. Cf. the terms used in
Owen, Lectures on the Comparative Anatomy and Physiology of Vertebrate Animals, Delivered at the
Royal College of Surgeons in 1844 and 1846, Part 1: Fishes (London, 1846), p. 41 and passim.
7 Joseph Maclise, "Skeleton," in Cyclopaedia of Anatomy and Physiology, ed. R. B. Todd, Vol. 4
(London, 1847-1849), pp. 622-676, on p. 623; and Maclise, "On the Nomenclature of Anatomy (Ad-
dressed to Professors Owen and Grant," Lancet, 14 Mar. 1846, pp. 298-301, on p. 300.
8 Richard Owen, On the Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton (London, 1848), p.
177; and Owen, Memoir on the Pearly Nautilus (Nautilus Pompilius, Linn.) with Illustrations of Its
External Form and Internal Structure (London, 1832), p. 2. See also Hans Haupt, "Das Homologie-
prinzip bei Richard Owen: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Platonismus in der Biologie," Sudhoffs Archiv
far Geschichte der Medizin und der Naturwissenschaften, 1935, 28:143-228, on p. 160; and Desmond,
Politics of Evolution (cit. n. 3), p. 342.
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RICHARD OWEN'S VERTEBRATE ARCHETYPE 235
defined the term differently. In his Comparative Osteology of 1847, for example,
Maclise interpreted the archetype as "unity." By this he meant the sum total of all
skeletal modifications, from which each particular species could be derived by sub-
traction of certain complexities. His somewhat convoluted definition ran as follows:
"Unity, or the archetype, is a name which may be applied to characterize that whole
structure which is capable of undergoing metamorphosis or subtraction through all
degrees of quantity severally equal to all those proportional forms which stand in
series with itself." Thus, according to Maclise's definition, the more highly devel-
oped a skeleton, the closer it approximates the archetype. The human skeleton, then,
was thought to come nearest to the archetype, and it was on this organic form that
the Comparative Osteology was focused.9
This was the opposite of Owen's definition, for his archetype bore a resemblance
to the lowest vertebrate class, namely, fishes. In fact, it looked suspiciously like the
Amphioxus lanceolatus, the "proto-vertebrate" lancelet, which had just been de-
scribed for the first time by the Edinburgh morphologist John Goodsir. In On the
Archetype Owen did not offer a precise verbal definition of the morphological "ar-
chetype," but in a later dictionary entry he described it as "that ideal original or
fundamental pattern on which a natural group of animals or system of organs has
been constructed, and to modifications of which the various forms of such animals
or organs may be referred." And he added: "The archetypal figure has been most
clearly recognized in the study of the modifications of the skeleton of the vertebrate
"'O
animals.
Elsewhere-and this may be another reason for his repudiation of Maclise's prior-
ity-Owen drew attention to the unacknowledged adoption by Maclise of such Ow-
enian terms as serial homology and neural arch; he wrily commented: "It is with
pleasure that I see any of the new terms proposed in my "Lectures on the Vertebrata"
(1846) and "Report on the Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton"
. . . sanctioned by an original author like that of the "Comparative Osteology."1
THE ARCHETYPE FIGURE
A related reason for Owen's refusal to acknowledge Maclise may have been his
belief that credit belongs to the person who is first to execute a piece of work prop-
erly, rather than to someone who has the notion but fails to perfect it. In this case,
then, priority belongs to him who has given the archetype its correct and definitive
anatomical outline and definition. 12 Maclise had failed to do this; Owen, by contrast,
produced a beautiful diagram of the "ideal pattern or archetype of the vertebrate
9 Joseph Maclise, Comparative Osteology: Being Morphological Studies to Demonstrate the Archetype
Skeleton of Vertebrated Animals (London, 1847), text accompanying plates 15, 16. This focus on the
human skeleton was stressed in [W. B. Carpenter (?)], "Owen and Maclise on the Archetype Skeleton,"
British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review, 1848, 2:107-121, on p. 119. See also D. L. Ross,
"A Survey of Some Aspects of the Life and Work of Sir Richard Owen, K.C.B." (Ph.D. diss., Univ.
London, 1972), pp. 157-160.
'1 John Goodsir, "On the Anatomy of Amphioxus lanceolatus; Lancelet, Yarrell," Transactions of
the Edinburgh Royal Society, 1844, 15:247-264; and [Richard Owen], "Archetype," in A Dictionary
of Science, Literature, and Art, ed. W. T. Brande and G. W. Cox, Vol. 1 (London, 1856), p. 146.
" Owen, On the Archetype (cit. n. 8), p. 189.
12 See Owen, On the Archetype, p. 76: "He, however, becomes the true discoverer who establishes
the truth: and the sign of the proof is the general acceptance." See also Owen, Odontography; or, A
Treatise on the Comparative Anatomy of the Teeth: Their Physiological Relations, Mode of Development,
and Microscopic Structure, in the Vertebrate Animals (London, 1840-1845), p. xlix.
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236 NICOLAAS A. RUPKE
endoskeleton, as shown in a side view of the series of typical segments or 'vertebrae'
of which it is composed" (see Figure 3, lower half). The two crucial stages in the
development of this schema were the determination of a typical vertebra and the
homological reduction of entire skeletons to a series of such vertebrae-whether the
sacrum on one end or the skull on the other, or whether fish, reptile, bird, or mam-
mal. At the anteriora nd posterior extremities of the archetype figure, Owen indicated
the first steps of those modifications that, depending on kind and degree, give the
archetype the characters of a class, order, genus, and species. In the same plate he
presented figures of the full modifications of the archetype that characterize fish,
reptile, bird, mammal, and human, each the typical skeleton of its respective tax-
onomic group. In a customarily anonymous review of Owen's oeuvre for the Quar-
terly Review, nominally written by the magistrate and naturalist W. J. Broderip but
in fact significantly coauthored by Owen himself, the two men commented:
Here the Vertebrate Archetype, so often accepted for the mere verbal and vague indi-
cation of a more or less inchoate abstraction-is placed bodily before our eyes in the
same "picture language" as that by which the type-skeletons of the fish, the reptile, the
bird, and the beast are distinctly represented in one comprehensive field. By a careful
examination of this plate alone, we venture to say, any one intelligently desirous to
comprehend the structure of the bony frame-work of Man and the lower animals, would
learn more, and more easily, than from any previous work on Comparative Osteology.'3
Was the morphological definition and representation of the archetype wholly Ow-
en's work, or was the figure, like the term, an improvement upon the less perfect
work of a predecessor? The book of 1848 included no mention of any possible source
for the archetype image and suggested that Owen had come upon it in the Baconian
course of strict inductive research. This is not to say that Owen failed to refer to
relevant literature by predecessors in transcendental morphology. On the contrary:
he extensively reviewed the publications by his forerunners, in particulart he classics
of idealist morphology by Lorenz Oken, Johann Baptist von Spix, Ludwig Heinrich
Bojanus, Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and Carl Gustav Carus, chronologically
listed. In a later autobiographicale ssay, Owen actually complimented himself on the
fact that he "thus generously refers to the services of others."'14 It is therefore the
more astonishing that he failed to reveal the source of his archetype figure: Carus's
Von den Ur-Theilen des Knochen und Schalengeriistes, published in 1828-a hefty
volume, thoroughly scrutinized by Owen.
In several instances, when Owen reviewed the work of predecessors, he did not
so much give them credit as use them to present a contrast with his own work, which
was, in the words of the Broderip-Owen duo, "new rather than revived, new at least
in the best sense as being the result of strict induction." The German transcenden-
talists, and in particular Carus, were described not as having led the way for Owen
13 Owen, On the Archetype, p. 176; and [W. J. Broderip and Richard Owen], "Generalizations of
Comparative Anatomy," Quarterly Review, 1853, 93:46-83, on pp. 78-79. The fact of Owen's coau-
thorship is made clear in Rev. Richard Owen, The Life of Richard Owen, 2 vols., Vol. 1 (London,
1894), pp. 373-374.
14 Owen, On the Archetype, pp. 72-80, 164-171, and passim (on the work of others); and [Owen],
"Richard Owen, M.D., D.C.L., F.R.S., Superintendent of the Natural History Departments, British
Museum," in Owen's data for a scientific biography, British Museum (Natural History), London, Li-
brary, Owen Collection, no. 24, p. 13.
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RICHARD OWEN'S VERTEBRATE ARCHETYPE 237
but, rather, as having failed in their attempts at transcendental morphology. With
respect to the archetype, Broderip and Owen wrote:
No rational or feasible answer had been offered from any quarter. The "Natur-philoso-
phie" school, with its "all-in-every-part"-its humerus of the head-pubis of the head-
and other "mystical jargon" -(so deemed by Cuvier and common sense) helped, like
a will-o'-the-wisp, further to perplex and mislead the traveller of this dark region. Carus,
who saw a vertebra in every bone, to whom the humerus was a lengthened-out body of
a vertebra, and all the "long bones" of the limbs were, like it, "vertebrae of the third
degree," was no better guide.15
As Adrian Desmond, Philip Rehbock, and Phillip Sloan have shown, Owen came
into contact with transcendental morphology during the few months he spent as a
student in Edinburgh (autumn 1824-spring 1825), during a visit to Paris (July-Au-
gust 1831), and during the early days of his employment as an assistant curator at
the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. 16 In addition, Owen knew
the German scene and extensively tapped its sources of relevant literature. He was
particularlyw ell acquainted with the Naturphilosophen Lorenz Oken and Carl Gustav
Carus, both of whom he knew personally and with whom he conducted an infrequent
but steady correspondence. Oken he met in 1838, during the Freiburg meeting of
the Gesellschaft Deutscher Naturforscher und Arzte. This was a glorious event for
Owen, because in spite of his relative juniority he was treated as an international
celebrity. His meeting with Carus took place in London and proved to be equally
flattering. In 1844 the king of Saxony visited England and Scotland, accompanied
by Carus, his physician-in-ordinary. No sooner had they arrived in the metropolis
than Carus hastened to the Hunterian Museum to see Owen, "the curator, augmentor
and expounder of the collection." "Owen pleases me greatly," Carus wrote in his
travelogue, "a sensible, able man, deeply versed in what is old, and ready for the
reception of what is new." Carus seized the opportunity of a second visit to measure
the head of the "British Cuvier" and add its dimensions to his craniological tables.
They met again at a dinner given by the prime minister, Robert Peel, in honor of
the visiting king, during which Owen, in addressing the guests, spoke of the high
value he placed upon Carus's work. 17
In the secondary literature, Oken is often singled out as the main representative
of German Naturphilosophie to have influenced Owen. This pinpointing is based not
on a comparison of Oken's work with that of Owen, but largely on the prominence
Owen himself gave to his German colleague. The two most conspicuous instances
of this were the 1847 translation of Oken's Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie into En-
glish, which was instigated by Owen, and the entry on Oken in the eighth edition
15 [Broderip and Owen], "Generalizations" (cit. n. 13), pp. 82, 74.
16 See Desmond, Politics of Evolution (cit. n. 3); Rehbock, Philosophical Naturalists (cit. n. 5), pp.
68-87; and Richard Owen, The Hunterian Lectures in Comparative Anatomy, May-June, 1837, ed.
Phillip R. Sloan (London: British Museum [Natural History]; Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1991).
17 C. G. Carus, England und Schottland im Jahre 1844 (Berlin, 1845), pp. 115-126. For quotations
see Max Neuburger, "C. G. Carus on the State of Medicine in Britain in 1844," in Science, Medicine,
and History, ed. E. A. Underwood, 2 vols., Vol. 2 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1953), pp. 263-273,
on pp. 265-266. On Owen's introductions to Oken and Carus see Rev. Owen, Life of Richard Owen
(cit. n. 13), Vol. 1, pp. 130-139, 232. See also J. W. Gruber's very helpful "Calendar of Richard
Owen Correspondence," British Museum, Owen Collection, no. 87.
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238 NICOLAAS A. RUPKE
of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, written by Owen and published separately in 1860
as Life of Lorenz Oken.'8
A comparison of the oeuvres of the two men shows, however, that Oken's impact
on Owen was more general than specific. Oken's was a philosophical, highly spec-
ulative, and deductive mind; Owen's was none of these. They shared a commitment
to transcendental morphology, but no specific areas of research interest. Although
Owen particularlyp raised Oken's inaugural address at Jena, Uber die Bedeutung der
Schadelknochen (1807), he rejected Oken's version of the theory of the skull and
adopted instead the more moderate one developed by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
and Carus. As Owen later commented, "The brilliant light thrown by Oken on a
wider or higher Law of Correspondences, in his 'Discourse on the Cranial Vertebrae'
was obscured by his further illustrations of Schelling's transcendental idea of 'the
repetition of the whole in every part.' "'9 The vertebrate archetype occurs in none of
Oken's works, while it does appear in those of Goethe and Carus.
Owen's promotion of Oken was self-serving in three ways. Admittedly, Owen
was genuinely fond of the tempestuous colleague who had honored him at Freiburg
and had generously translated his Memoir on the Pearly Nautilus into German. This
fondness shines through in the unusual passion with which Owen defended Oken's
priority over Goethe in the "discovery" of the vertebral nature of the skull. To para-
phrase Hugh Trevor-Roper'sr emark about the forger Edmund Backhouse ("The mere
fact that Backhouse said something does not necessarily make it untrue"), the mere
fact that Owen praised a colleague did not necessarily imply self-glorification. Yet
publicizing Oken primarily served Owen's own cause. Oken's Lehrbuch could be
interpreted as advocating a vague theory of evolution to which Owen was sympa-
thetic. Owen used the English translation of Oken's views like a hat on stick, testing
whether it would draw enemy fire. When Adam Sedgwick and others duly reacted,
Owen decided to keep his own head well down.20 Moreover, if Oken was presented
as the prime example of Continental transcendental morphology, Owen's work ac-
quired, by contrast, a look of sound induction that made his claim to Baconian or-
thodoxy seem all the more solidly founded. At the same time, by placing Oken in
the foreground as his main Continental counterpart and predecessor, Owen laid a
false trail-whether intentionally or not-away from Goethe and Carus, to whom
he was indebted for the idea of an archetypal schema.
Goethe and Carus were far less speculative than Oken, and they were the ones
who had developed the notion and image of an archetype-although the concept of
an organic prototype or Urbild can be traced back to Denis Diderot, J. B. R. Robinet,
18 Concerning Oken's influence on Owen see, e.g., Charles Singer, A Short History of Biology: A
General Introduction to the Study of Living Things (Oxford: Clarendon, 1931), p. 219; and M. J. S.
Rudwick, The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Palaeontology (London: MacDonald,
1972), p. 211. This view has never been seriously challenged. W. C. Williams, however, in his entry
on Owen in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography (16 vols. [New York: Scribners, 1970-1986], Vol.
10, pp. 260-263), correctly mentions Goethe and Carus as influences, in addition to Oken. For Owen's
account of Oken see Richard Owen, "Lorenz Oken," Encyclopaedia Britannica, 8th ed., Vol. 16 (Edin-
burgh, 1858), pp. 498-503; and Owen, Life of Lorenz Oken (London, 1860).
'9 Richard Owen, untitled manuscript history of his contributions to the theory of organic evolution,
British Museum, Owen Collection, no. 90, Vol. 3, pp. 179-190, on p. 179.
20 Owen, "Lorenz Oken" (cit. n. 18), p. 502; and H. R. Trevor-Roper, Hermit of Peking: The Hidden
Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse (1976; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 344. On the issue of Owen
and transmutations ee Evelleen Richards, "A Question of Property Rights: Richard Owen's Evolutionism
Reassessed," British Journalfor the History of Science, 1987, 20:129-171. See also Desmond, Ar-
chetypes and Ancestors (cit. n. 3).
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RICHARD OWEN'S VERTEBRATE ARCHETYPE 239
and, in Goethe's immediate vicinity, Johann Gottfried Herder.21G oethe's famous
Urpflanze, delineated in his 1790 treatise on the metamorphosis of plants, is to some
extent the botanical counterpartt o the vertebrate archetype. A significant difference,
however, is that the archetypal plant was not only composed of its most fundamental
element, that is, the leaf (comparable to the vertebra as the elemental building block),
but exhibited all its various basic modifications, such as a stem and all the essential
parts of a flower. Goethe did not actually sketch the Urpflanze or an equivalent
diagram for the animal kingdom or any of its subkingdoms, but in 1790-1791 he
did point to the desirability and possibility of such a construct in one of several
programmatic essays on comparative anatomy, to be based on osteology ("Versuch
uber die Gestalt der Tiere").22
It fell to Carus to act upon the programmatic essays by Goethe, about whom he
wrote several books. Carus was an interesting figure who made major contributions
to biology, psychology, philosophy, painting, and art history. He was born in Leip-
zig, where he studied medicine and inauguratedt he teaching of comparative anatomy
as an independent subject. He received internationalr ecognition for his discovery of
the circulation of the blood in insects. In his capacity as a physician, he made a
name as a gynecologist. He was cofounder of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Natur-
forscher und Arzte. A member of the Dresden school of Romantic painters, he was
particularly close to Caspar David Friedrich, to whose paintings his own bear a re-
semblance. As an art critic, Carus was most of all interested in landscape painting.
In 1829-1830 he gave a series of lectures on psychology in which, among other
things, he developed the notion of the "unconscious." This led to his most lasting
reputation, as a precursor of psychoanalysis. In later life he became increasingly
preoccupied with metaphysical issues. Carus's philosophy, which he called "enthe-
ism," was essentially Aristotelian in that he interpreted the world as an unfolding
unity or developing multiplicity which he called God. The unknown divine is re-
vealed in nature through organization and organic unity. Real understanding is a
function of the universal unconscious, the unknown divine, becoming conscious in
us. In the twentieth century, Carus has proved of interest to the anthroposophists.23
In all this, what was probably Carus's proudest accomplishment has drifted into
the background: his massive work on comparative osteology, Von den Ur-Theilen
des Knochen und Schalengeriistes (1828), on which his arm rests in the well-known
painting of 1844 (Figure 2). Carus also wrote a more elementary, three-volume text-
book on comparative anatomy and physiology. In 1822 he had met Goethe, and they
discovered in each other kindred spirits who agreed on the vertebral theory of the
skull and even on the disputed number of cephalic vertebrae. This reinforced Carus's
21 A. 0. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of an Idea (1936; New York:
Harper, 1960), pp. 279-280.
22 A fairly recent edition of Goethe's morphological writings, with commentary, is by Dorothea Kuhn,
in Johann Wolfgang Goethe: Sdmmtliche Werke, 40 vols., Vol. 24: Naturkundliche Schriften II: Schriften
zur Morphologie (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1980). See also R. Dobel, ed., Lex-
ikon der Goethe-Zitate (Zurich: Artemis, 1968), pp. 961-962; and Valentin Haecker, Goethes mor-
phologische Arbeiten und die neuere Forschung (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1927).
23 Among the various studies of Carus see Hans Kern, Carl Gustav Carus: Personlichkeit und Werk
(Berlin: Widukind, 1942); Marianne Prause, Carl Gustav Carus: Leben und Werk (Berlin: Deutscher
Verlag fur Kunstwissenschaft, 1968); Wolfgang Genschorek, Carl Gustav Carus: Arzt, Kunstler, Na-
turforscher (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1978); and Ekkehard Meffert, Carl Gustav Carus: Sein Leben, seine An-
schauung von der Erde (Stuttgart: Freies Geistesleben, 1986). See also Rubin Gotesky's entry on Carus
in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards, 8 vols., Vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1967),
pp. 42-43.
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