30 ON GOETHE'S SCIENTIFIC RESEARCHES. 



The peculiar character of the descriptive sciences botany r 

 zoology, anatomy, and the like is a necessary result of the 

 work" imposed upon them. They undertake to collect and sift 

 an enormous mass of facts, and, above all, to bring them into a 

 logical order or system. Up to this point their work is only 

 the dry task of a lexicographer ; their system is nothing more 

 than a muniment-room in which the accumulation of papers is 

 so arranged that any one can find what he wants at any moment. 

 The more intellectual part of their work and their real interest 

 only begins when they attempt to feel after the scattered traces 

 of law and order in the disjointed, heterogeneous mass, and out 

 of it to construct for themselves an orderly system, accessible at 

 a glance, in which every detail has its due place, and gains 

 additional interest from its connection with the whole. 



In such studies, both the organising capacity and the insight 

 of our poet found a congenial sphere the epoch was moreover 

 propitious to him. He found ready to his hand a sufficient 

 store of logically arranged materials in botany and comparative 

 anatomy, copious and systematic enough to admit of a compre- 

 hensive view, and to indicate the way to some happy glimpse 

 of an all-pervading la\v ; while his contemporaries, if they made 

 any efforts in this direction, wandered without a compass, or 

 else they were so absorbed in the dry registration of facts, that 

 they scarcely ventured to think of anything beyond. It was 

 reserved for Goethe to introduce two ideas of infinite fruit- 

 fulness. 



The first was the conception that the differences in the 

 anatomy of different animals are to be looked upon as variations 

 from a common phase or type, induced by differences 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, 

 mammalia, 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 dis- 



