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.^ 
® It is an interesting fact that 
Goethe took up the metamor- 
phosis of plants after he had 
been led to a conception of the 
higher vertebrate type ; and, 
also, that he was led to discover 
the intermaxillary bone in man 
by deduction from his type- 
theory. He tells us that, early 
in the eighties of last century, 
before the idea of plant-meta- 
morphosis occurred to him, he 
worked hard at osteology, for 
the purpose of finding the 
general type of skeleton, which 
he conceived must be discover- 
able ‘ because the already long 
accepted comparative anatomy 
involves the assumption that it 
exists.’ The doctrine current 
among anatomists at that time, 
that men are distinguished from 
apes by the absence of the 
intermaxillary bone, stood in 
the way of Goethe’s hypothesis ; 
and the importance which he 
attached to his discovery? of 
evidences of its existence is 
therefore very intelligible. (See 
Ostcoloffie, 1819, in Goethe’s 
VVerke, ed. 1867, Bd. 32, p. 
191.) 
