n adduce no morphological
investigations which better support this declaration than those very
phylogenetic researches "as to the cranium of the Selachians, as a
basis for the critical examination of the genesis of the cranium of
the vertebrata," 1872. As Virchow had formerly thoroughly studied the
old skull-hypothesis, and in his admirable discourse on "Goethe as a
Naturalist," 1861, had given an excellent exposition of it; as
moreover he had produced most valuable contributions to the normal and
pathological anatomy of the human skull, we might have expected that
he would have received Gegenbaur's grand reform of the theory of the
skull, and historical solution of the skull-problem, with the greatest
interest, and have made it the clue to his own further researches. But
we seek in vain through Virchow's latest contributions to the study of
the human skull, for any indication of his knowing or appreciating
Gegenbaur's investigations. On the contrary, we see him persistently
moving, without any clear goal in view, on that trodden and devious
path of investigation which finds the highest aim of craniological
science in the measuring of skulls, or craniometry.

We are far from undervaluing the full significance of the results of
exact and careful descriptions and measurements of various
conformations of the skull as an empirical basis for a true and
scientific study of the skull--_i.e._, for comparative and genetic
craniology. But still we must say that the way and method by which
this skull measurement has, for ten years now, been pursued by
numerous craniologists can never yield corresponding scientific
results; on the contrary, though it is cried up as the "exact
morphology" of the skull, it simply loses itself in the domains of
harmless trifling. A large amount of time has in the last ten years
been squandered in disputes as to the best method of measuring skulls,
while the craniologists concerned have not, in the first place,
answered the obviously most important question: What end they propose
to gain by this specialist measuring, what proposition they mean to
prove by it? Most of those numerous skull measurers know nothing
beyond the perfect human skull, or at most the skulls of a few other
mammalia, while the comparative morphology and historical development
of the crania of the lower vertebrata are wholly unknown to them; and
yet these last contain the true key to the comprehension of the
others. One single mont