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Updated: June 16, 2025
Already, in his Croonian lecture of 1858, "On the Theory of the Vertebrate Skull," he had challenged, and by direct morphological investigation overthrown, the theory of Oken, adopted and enlarged upon by Owen, that the adult skull is a modified vertebral column.
Oken, the great naturalist, who refused to give up "Isis," a periodical publication, also withdrew to Switzerland. Numbers of the younger professors went to America. The solemnization of the October festival was also prohibited, and the triumphal monument on the field of Leipzig was demolished.
Moreover, the points of indifference reappear: the plant corresponds to water, the animal to iron. Schelling was far outdone in fantastic analogies of this kind by his pupils, especially by Oken, who in his Sketch of the Philosophy of Nature, 1805, compares the sense of hearing, for example, to the parabola, to a metal, to a bone, to the bird, to the mouse, and to the horse.
Oken, "of larger size than an infusorial point. No organism is, nor ever has one been created, which is not microscopic. Whatever is larger has not been created, but developed. Man has not been created, but developed." On this fundamental assumption the whole theory is based. But we must carefully distinguish between the Atomic Theory and the application which is here made of it.
An annual meeting of German naturalists had at that time been arranged under the auspices of Oken, the great naturalist, and at the meeting held at Berlin, in 1888, the Freiherr von Cotta, by whom the moral and material interests of Germany have been greatly promoted, drew up the first plan for a junction of the commercial union of Southern Germany with that of the North, as the first step to the future liberation of Germany from all internal commercial restrictions.
I know of no more solid and important contributions to biology in the past seven years than Haeckel's work on the Radiolaria, and the researches of his distinguished colleague Gegenbaur, in vertebrate anatomy; while in Haeckel's Generelle Morphologie there is all the force, suggestiveness, and, what I may term the systematizing power, of Oken, without his extravagance.
But it will serve our present purpose just to point out a few of the extreme absurdities resulting from the doctrine which Oken seems to hold in common with Hegel, that "to philosophise on Nature is to re-think the great thought of Creation." Here is a sample:
Jena is Jena to-day not so much because Guericke and Fichte and Hegel and Schiller and Oken taught here in the past, as because it has for thirty-eight years been the seat of the labors of Germany's greatest naturalist, one of the most philosophical zoologists of any country or any age, Professor Ernst Haeckel.
Another instance is afforded in the grand intuition of Oken, who, when rambling in the Hartz Mountains, lit upon the skull of a deer, and saw that the cranium was but an expansion of vertebrae, and that the vertebra is the theoretical archetype of the entire osseous framework, the foundation of modern Osteology.
In one point, however, we must own that he seems slow of apprehension or limited by preconceived opinions, in his reception of the homologies pointed out by Oken and the Physiophilosophical observers. In the same range of intellects we should reckon Linnaeus and Humboldt, and should have reckoned Goethe, had he given himself to science.
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