z8o THE HISTORY OF BIOLOGY 



Jena. Herder, it will be remembered, was endeavouring to find one com- 

 mon type for the form and functions of human beings and animals. During 

 the latter half of the eighteenth century, moreover, a dispute had been 

 going on with regard to the relation of man to the apes, about which we 

 heard through La Mettrie and Camper; the former, indeed, had sought to 

 prove that the orang-utan was a kind of human being, which it should be 

 possible to civilize, and the indignation the theory aroused in the Chris- 

 tian-conservative people had found expression in violent polemics, while 

 Camper, through his paper on the anatomy of the orang-utan, referred to 

 above, gave support to those who maintained the dignity of man. Goethe, 

 who as a young man was somewhat averse to religion, to which his fa- 

 mous poem Prometheus in particular testifies, entered into the dispute on the 

 side of the materialists. Camper had asserted that in the facial skeleton of 

 the orang-utan there is a suture which, starting from the nasal cavity, ex- 

 tends on either side as far as the space between the corner tooth and the fore- 

 most front tooth; this suture does not exist in man, in contrast to the apes 

 and other mammals. In consequence of this Goethe wrote a short treatise in 

 which he maintains that the intermaxillary bone, which terminates in the 

 said suture, is found also in man — an assertion based chiefly on the exist- 

 ence of sutures which in the gum and above it separate the bone in question 

 from the upper jaw and adjoining bones. Goethe also described it as existing 

 in certain other mammals in which this bone had not previously been found. 

 The treatise was sent in 1784 to Camper, who expressed courteous thanks for 

 it and specially complimented Goethe on having established the existence of 

 the bone in the walrus. In regard to the discovery in man, on the other hand. 

 Camper had no remarks to offer, and that for sound reasons; as a matter of 

 fact, the bone had been known ever since Vesalius's days and had been de- 

 scribed in man, in whom in the embryonic stage it is clearly separated, while 

 in full-grown individuals its outer suture disappears. This difference between 

 man and the ape existed just as Camper had pointed out, and for obvious 

 reasons Goethe had not been able to disprove it. The fact that he imagined 

 he had "discovered" the intermaxillary bone in man was no doubt due to 

 the accident that some text-books of that time treated the incompletely 

 separated bone in the full-grown man as if it were one with the maxilla 

 superior. The claim to this discovery has on Goethe's authority even reap- 

 peared in literary histories and is believed by the public, unjustifiable though 

 it is. Goethe's pamphlet on the question remained for the time unprinted, 

 presumably owing to lack of encouragement on the part of the specialists; 

 at any rate, there were no financial obstacles standing in the way of its 

 publication. 



Goethe, however, continued his anatomical experiments and finally 

 published the theoretical views at which he arrived, in a paper entitled 



