320 M. Pictet on the Writings of Goethe 



this fact as tending to establish that man and the animals 

 have not a common structure. Feeling what an immense di- 

 stance separates man from the rest of the creation, they 

 sought with care for all the differences of organization by 

 which this distance could be increased ; not perceiving that 

 these details of structure are nothing in comparison with dif- 

 ferences of a higher order, which alone can establish an im- 

 passable barrier. Goethe understood and demonstrated that 

 in this particular, as in others, the organic materials which con- 

 stitute the body of man are the same as those which compose 

 that of animals. He proved that man, at every age, *shoAvs 

 traces of the bipartiteness of the bones of the jaw, and that it 

 is possible by certain criteria to find, in the adult, in a portion 

 of the maxillary, the true incisive bone of the Mammiferae. He 

 confirmed this view of the matter by proving that in the child 

 at its birth the two bones are separate and distinct, and that 

 the only difference that can be pointed out in regard to this 

 is, that in man they are consolidated very early by the ope- 

 ration of life, whilst in the greater part of the Mammiferae 

 they unite late, and in some not at all. This discovery of 

 Goethe, although bearing upon a detail which may appear 

 minute, has been of importance, inasmuch as his inquiry was 

 one of the first conceived in this spirit of establishing analo- 

 gies, an idea which has been so fertile in beautiful results. 

 We have said already how long a time was necessary for the 

 adoption of this opinion. 



The principle of the head being composed of vertebrae, that 

 remarkable application of the law of homology, had also struck 

 Goethe before the time when first it was submitted to the ex- 

 amination of anatomists ; but he did not publish his ideas re- 

 specting it, and consequently he cannot be considered as its 

 author. We know that the bones of the skull, formerly con- 

 sidered as special formations, have subsequently to the be- 

 ginning of this century been viewed in a different light by 

 some naturalists. As the brain is the prolongation of the 

 spinal marrow, so the skull is, according to these anatomists, 

 the prolongation of the spinal column. The brain differs from 

 the spinal marrow by its expansion ; the skull differs from the 

 vertebrae by a greater development of the superposed laminae 



