Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/1455/en

The skull articulates into the facial skull and the braincase. In newborn animals, both still form a unified, approximately spherical shape — the shape the human being preserves throughout life. The facial skull then elongates during the animal's brief youth and thereafter dominates the head's form. The head is, in a certain sense, in danger of being overgrown by the metabolic forces. This phenomenon and its mastery appears with particular impressiveness in the antler-bearers, and differently again in cattle. The male deer, for instance, accomplishes each year anew a tremendous metabolic feat: from the braincase grows the richly blood-filled, velvet-skinned antler. This happens in the first half of the year. At the beginning of the second half-year, the power of the metabolic forces surging up into the head is expelled from the antler — it dies into the bony, interior-enclosing form of the branching tines and becomes a mighty sense organ, feeling its way into the warmth-light-air periphery. In winter it is shed. Not otherwise, and yet in polar contrast, is the situation with the head-extensions of cattle: the horns, which grow on year by year and at the same time die into the horn sheath. Through this inwardly directed sense organ, the tremendous metabolic activity pressing up toward the nerve-sense organisation is turned back into the body by the died-away horn sheath. Thus the cow preserves, in a way other than the deer, the nerve-sense forces of the head from the encroaching power of the metabolic forces.