THE PLANT WORLD. 69 



GOETHE'S PALM TREE. 

 By E. J. Hill. 



IN an editorial note of The Plant World for January surprise 

 seems to be intimated that a visit of Goethe to the Botanical 

 Garden of the University of Padua, Italy, should lead to naming 

 a certain Chamaerops "Goethe's palm tree." Whatever the visit may 

 have sionified to the ofardener at the time it was made, or whatever 

 led to the preservation of the tradition, the relations of tlie tree to 

 Goethe are quite worthy of remembrance. We need to recall the fact 

 that the greatest of German poets became in middle life an ardent 

 student of botany and of some other natural or physical sciences, such 

 as osteology, geology, and optics, and in the course of his life made 

 several contributions to these subjects bearing more particularly on 

 their theoretical or philosophical side. Among these is his "Meta- 

 morphoses of Plants," published in 1790, four years after his visit to 

 the garden of Padua. This is an attempt to discover an ideal or 

 standard flower of which all existing flowers are modifications, or from 

 which they may have deviated under varied conditions of growth. 

 Though faulty in method and failing in its main purpose, facts of 

 value regarding the homology of the various parts of the flower and 

 the leaf were brought out. 



Goethe wrote a sequel to this treatise in 1818 and revised it in 

 1831, the year before his death. He entitles it "History of my Bo- 

 tanical Studies. " It is autobiographic, in a sense apologetic, written 

 at the request of friends to explain how a man knoAvn chiefly as a 

 poet and with a training in early life almost v/holly literar}" came later 

 to work in so differest a field. Up to the time of this change he con- 

 fesses he had little idea of outward nature or knowledge of the three 

 kingdoms, so called. It is an instructive account of an alteration of 

 his mental habits by contact with nature, and as the study of plant 

 life was the introductory causes it led him to say that after Shakespere 

 and Spinoza the man of greatest influence on his intellectual life was 

 Linnaeus. As a hunter in the forests about Weimer, he and the rather 

 gay "Weimer circle" were led to look into methods of forest preserva- 

 tion and management, the earliest steps not only of his interest in 

 botany but among the first in the important subject of forestry in 

 Germany. The relations of trees to the soil in which they grew, to 



