ON GOETHE'S SCIENTIFIC RESEARCHES. 35 



anatomy of different animals are to be looked upon as 

 variations from a common phase or type, induced by dif- 

 ferences of habit, locality, or food. The observation 

 which led him to this fertile conception was by no means 

 a striking one ; it is to be found in a monograph on the 

 intermaxillary bone, written as early as 1786. It was 

 known that in most vertebrate animals (that is, mam- 

 malia, birds, amphibia, and fishes) the upper jaw consists 

 of two bones, the upper jaw-bone and the intermaxillary 

 bone. The former always contains in the mammalia the 

 molar and the canine teeth, the latter the incisors. Man, 

 who is distinguished from all other animals by the ab- 

 sence of the projecting snout, has, on the contrary, on 

 each side only one bone, the upper jaw-bone, containing 

 all the teeth. This being so, Groethe discovered in the 

 human skull faint traces of the sutures, which in animals 

 unite the upper and middle jaw-bones, and concluded 

 from it that man had originally possessed an inter- 

 maxillary bone, which had subsequently coalesced with 

 the upper jaw-bone. This obscure fact opened up to him 

 a source of the most intense interest in the field of osteo- 

 logy, generally so much decried as the driest of studies. 

 That details of structure should be the same in man and 

 in animals when the parts continue to perform similar 

 functions had involved nothing extraordinary. In fact, 

 Camper had already attempted, on this principle, to trace 

 similarities of structure even between man and fishes. 

 But the persistence of this similarity, at least in a rudi- 

 mentary form, even in a case when it evidently does not 

 correspond to any of the requirements of the complete 

 human structure, and consequently needs to be adapted 

 to them by the coalescence of two parts originally sepa- 

 rate, was what struck Groethe's far-seeing eye, and sug- 

 gested to him a far more comprehensive view than had 

 hitherto been taken. Further studies soon convinced 

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