290 OWEN'S POSITION IN 



to interest him, rather than that which interests 

 them. 



On the face of the matter, it is not obvious 

 that the brilliant poet had less chance of doing 

 good service in natural science than the dullest 

 of dissectors and nomenclators. Indeed, as I 

 have endeavoured to indicate, there was con- 

 siderable reason, a hundred years ago, for think- 

 ing that an infusion of the artistic way of looking 

 at things might tend to revivify the somewhat 

 mummified body of technical zoology and botany. 

 Great ideas were floating about ; the artistic appre- 

 hension was needed to give these airy nothings 

 a local habitation and a name ; to convert vague 

 suppositions into definite hypotheses. And I ap- 

 prehend that it was just this service which Goethe 

 rendered by writing his essays on the inter- 

 maxillary bone, on osteology generally, and on 

 the metamorphoses of plants. 8 



3 It is an interesting fact that able 'because the already long 



Goethe took up the metamor- accepted comparative anatomy 



phosis of plants after he had involves the assumption that it 



been led to a conception of the exists.' The doctrine current 



higher vertebrate type ; and, among anatomists at that time, 



also, that he was led to discover that men are distinguished from 



the intermaxillary bone in man apes by the absence of the 



by deduction from his type- intermaxillary bone, stood in 



theory. He tells us that, early the way of Goethe's hypothesis ; 



in the eighties of last century, and the importance which he 



before the idea of plant-meta- attached to his discovery of 



morphosis occurred to him, he evidences of its existence is 



worked hard at osteology, for therefore very intelligible. (See 



the purpose of finding the Osteologie, 1819, in Goethe's 



general type of skeleton, which Werke^ ed. 1867, Bd. 32, p. 



lie conceived must be discover- 191.) 



