2 Sir Otto Jaffe on 



majority in 1775 Prince Carl August invited Goethe to Weimar, 

 Goethe accepted the invitation. He arrived in Weimar in 

 November of the same year, and for fifty-seven years he made 

 Weimar his home. Honours soon came to the poet. He was 

 given a seat in the Council, and Prince Carl offered him every 

 encouragement in his literary studies. Goethe worked unceasingly. 

 His State duties made great demands on his time, and soon he 

 became indispensable to the Prince, under whose protection he 

 had placed himself. Sir Otto having briefly referred to Goethe's 

 literary labours, said it was as a man of science that he proposed 

 to speak of him that night. Goethe did not occupy himself in 

 scientific studies as an amateur. Early in 1784 he discovered the 

 intermaxillary bone in man. In his studies in this direction he 

 was not only guided by the true philosophic conception ; he was 

 also led to the true method of demonstration — namely, comparison 

 of the various modifications which this bone underwent in the 

 animal kingdom. In other words, Goethe was the true forerunner of 

 Darwin. It was the unity in nature, which at that time was to a 

 large extent only a poetical idea, that guided Goethe in his 

 treatise on the metamorphoses of plants. The care of his cottage 

 garden led him to the study of plants, and he soon found himself 

 attracted to wide generalisations. Goethe clearly saw that all the 

 different parts of plants, except the stem and the root, might be 

 regarded as modifications of the leaf; that leaf, calyx, corolla, 

 bud, pistil, and stamen were all referable to the same type, and 

 that whether a plant produced leaves, flowers, or fruit depended 

 on the differentiation of the nutrition which it received. He 

 was less fortunate in his theory of colours. " Farbenlehre " his 

 attempts to prove that Newton was wrong, led him to many 

 ingenious experiments, but as he was no mathematician the result 

 of his labours in this direction were of no practical result, so 

 artists admired him, but most- men of science ridiculed his 

 persistence. When Goethe was 82 years of age he still published 

 an essay on " The Tendency of Plants to Spiralforms ;" and at 

 the age of 83 he wrote an essay on " Rainbows." In his 

 old age Goethe was not spared the pains and sorrows of life. 



