280 ON THE STRUCTURE OF THE VERTEBRATE SKULL. 



man of science. From his youth up, passionately devoted to 

 the natural sciences, more especially to botany and to osteology ; 

 and induced by the habit of his mind to search for the general 

 truths which give life to the dry bones of detail, Goethe had 

 been led to drink deeply of the spirit of morphology, during 

 his study of the metamorphosis of plants and his successful 

 search after the premaxillary bones of man, imagined, before 

 his time, to be wanting. With a mind thus prepared, it was 

 no wonder that, as Goethe writes, the notion of the vertebral 

 composition of the skull had early dawned upon him : — 



" The three hindermost parts I knew before, but it was only 

 in 1791, on picking up an old and broken sheep's skull amidst 

 the sandy dunes of the Jewish cemetery in Venice, that I per- 

 ceived the facial bones also to be made up of great vertebras ; 

 and observing, as I clearly did, the gradual passage from the 

 first pterygoid bone to the ethmoid bone and to the spongy 

 bones, the whole became plain." 



Not improbably deterred, however, by the many difficulties 

 which must have presented themselves to him, in attempting to 

 carry out these views with due scientific sobriety, Goethe kept 

 them to himself, or shared them only with his immediate 

 friends, for thirty years ; the passage cited, in which they are 

 first mentioned, bearing the date of 1820. 



But, in 1807, Lorenz Oken independently originated and, 

 what is more to the point, published, those views of the verte- 

 bral composition of the skull which have since attained such 

 world-wide celebrity ; so that the great poet's silent partner- 

 ship in the affair would be hardly worth mentioning were it not 

 that his reticence has been made the ground of severe attacks 

 upon his honour and veracity. It has been suggested that 

 Goethe, iull of years and of honours, thought it worth while to 

 attempt to steal from the young Professor of Jena the fame that 

 had accrued to him. And upon the infamy of such petty 

 larceny the poet's latest accuser has heaped the insinuation 

 that the author of "Faust ' and of "Meister" was so stupid a 

 plagiarist, as to copy, not only Oken's views, but his account of 

 the manner in which he came by them. 



" Vaguely and strangely, however, as Oken had blended the 



