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To this we gave warm assent, and told him that if he could bring it about we would be ready to start at a day's notice, and Agassiz added, eagerly, "Yes, and if there were any hope that he would take us, a word from you would have more weight than anything." Oken's answer gave us but cold comfort; nevertheless, he promised to write at once to Humboldt in our behalf.
The subjoined letter of about the same date from Alexander Braun to his father tells us how the projects so ardently urged upon his parents by Agassiz, and so affectionately accepted by them, first took form in the minds of the friends. MUNICH, February 15, 1829. . . .Last Thursday we were at Oken's.
The fourth, that of Cuvier, and Anatomical systems, with the classifications of Cuvier, Lamark, De Blainville, Ehrenberg, Burmeister, Owen, Milne-Edwards, Von Siebold and Stannius, Leuckart. The fifth section includes the Physiophilosophical systems, with diagrams of Oken's and Fitzinger's classifications, and a special article for the circular groups of McLeay.
Much to his credit, it may be said that a good share of Agassiz's invincible aversion to evolution may be traced to the spirit in which it was taken up by his early associate, Vogt, and, indeed, by most of the German school then and since, which justly offended both his scientific and his religious sense. Agassiz always "thought nobly of the soul," and could in no way approve either materialistic or agnostic opinions. The idealistic turn of his mind was doubtless confirmed in his student days at Munich, whither he and his friend Braun resorted after one session at Heidelberg, and where both devotedly attended the lectures of Schelling then in his later glory and of Oken, whose "Natur-Philosophie" was then in the ascendant. Although fascinated and inspired by Oken's
By such "consequentlys" and "therefores" it is, that men philosophise when they "re-think the great thought of Creation." By dogmas that pretend to be reasons, nothing is made to generate mathematics; and by clothing mathematics with matter, we have the universe! If now we deny, as we do deny, that the highest mathematical idea is the zero; if, on the other hand, we assert, as we do assert, that the fundamental idea underlying all mathematics, is that of equality; the whole of Oken's cosmogony disappears. And here, indeed, we may see illustrated, the distinctive peculiarity of the German method of procedure in these matters the bastard
The primitive or primordial kidneys of the amniote embryo were formerly called the "Wolffian bodies," and sometimes "Oken's bodies." They act for a time as kidneys, absorbing unusable juices from the embryonic body and conducting them to the cloaca afterwards to the allantois.
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