332 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



GOETHE AND THE CHEMISTS 



By ROY TEMPLE HOUSE 



NORMAN, OKIA. 



WE learn from " Dichtung und Wahrheit " that when the young 

 Goethe came home ill from the University of Leipzig in 1768, 

 he fell under the influence of a physician who claimed to have found an 

 infallible panacea which he did not dare use because he was afraid of 

 legal action against him. His young patient was suddenly seized with 

 an attack of violent illness which threatened his life, and the physician 

 was persuaded to use his mysterious drug, with the result that the young 

 man at once began to mend and soon recovered. This experience was 

 the beginning of Goethe's infatuation for alchemy, which began fan- 

 tastically enough — although we have no occasion to quarrel with it when 

 we remember its influence on " Faust " and " Die Wahlverwaud- 

 schaften " — but became in the course of time a serious and profitable 

 interest in chemical investigation. Although he was never a thoroughly 

 grounded chemist himself, his marvelous skill in forming mutually 

 profitable partnerships with specialists made his chemical activity of real 

 and great significance. 



Established at Weimar as an official member of the government, he 

 early made friends with the interesting court apothecary, Wilhelm 

 Heinrich Sebastian Buchholz. This gentleman had studied medicine 

 and received his medical degree, but after leaving school had devoted 

 himself to pharmacy and had bought what was then the only apothecary- 

 shop in "Weimar. He was a prosperous and jovial man of the world and 

 played an important part in the social life of the little capital, but he 

 was none the less a genuine scientist, and Goethe's debt to him was a 

 considerable one, as he himself admits in the narrative entitled " Ge- 

 schichte meines botanischen Studiums " which closes the " Meta- 

 morphose der Pflanzen." Buchholz kept up a large garden which con- 

 tained, we are told, " not only the herbs which he needed for his busi- 

 ness, but rare and newly discovered plants." He seems to have kept 

 himself well informed as to new discoveries and developments in his 

 own and related sciences, and when the Montgolfier brothers sent up 

 their balloon from Avignon in 1783, Buchholz tried a similar experi- 

 ment at Weimar; but Goethe wrote his friend Knebel, describing the 

 first attempt : " He torments the air in vain ; the balls refuse to rise." 

 His later efforts seem to have been crowned with success, to the aston- 

 ishment of the multitude and the distress of the pigeons; and Goethe, 



