Works The footprints of the Creator Author:Hugh Miller Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CEREBRAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE EARLIER VERTEBRATA. ITS APPARENT PRINCIPLE. It is held by a class of naturalists, some of them of the highest standing, that t... more »he skulls of the. yertebrata consist, like the columns to which they are attached, of vertebral joints, coin- posed each, in the more typical forms of head, as they are in the trunk, of five parts or elements, — the centrum or body the two spinous processes which enclose the spinal cord, and the two ribs. These cranial vertebra, four in number, correspond, it is said, to the four senses that have their seat in the head : there is the nasal vertebra, the centrum of which is the vomer, its spinal processes the nasal and ethmoid bones, and its ribs the upper jaws; there is the ocular vertebra, the centrum of which is the anterior portion of the sphenoid bone, its spinal processes the frontals, and its ribs the under jaws ; there is the lingual vertebra, the centrum of which is the posterior sphenoid bone, its spinal pio- cesses the parietals, and its ribs the hyoH and branciiia bones, — portions of the skeleton largely developed in fishes; and, lastly, there is the auditory vertebra, the centrum of which is the base of the occipital bone, and its spinal pro'- cesses the occipital crest, and which in the osseous fishes bears attached to it, as its ribs, the bones of the scapularring. And the cerebral segments thus constructed we find represented in typical diagrams of the skull, as real verte- brae. Professor Owen, in his lately published treatise on "The Nature of Limbs," — a work charged with valuable fact, and instinct with philosophy, — figures in his draught of Ihe archetypal skeleton of the vertebrata, the four vertebra; of the head, in a form as unequivocally such as any of the vertebrae of the neck or body. Now, for...« less