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Show 280 ON THE STRUC'I'URE OF 'I' HE; VER'fEBRA' TE SKULL. man of scw. nce. From his youth up, passionat,e lty devt ote1d to the natural sciences, Jnore especially to botany and o os eo ogy ; and 1· n d uce d by the ha<- bit of his mind to search f• or the general truth s wh 1. c I1 g1· v e r1f e to t·h e dry bo. n.e s of detail, Goethe h. . ad. been led to drink deeply of the spn·1 t of morpho~ogy, dunng his study of the 1netamorphosis of plants an~ h1~ successful search after the premaxillary bones of man, Imagn1ed, ?efore his time, to be wanting. vVith a Inind t~us prepared, It was no wonder that, as Goethe writes, the notiOn of the vertebral coinposition of the skull had early dawned upon hin1 :- "The three hindermost parts I knew before, but 1t was only in 1781, on picking up an old and broke~ sheep~s skull amidst the sandv dunes of the Jewish cemetery In Venice, that I perceived the facial bones also to be made up of great vertebrre; and observing, as I dearly did, the gradual passage from the first pterygoid bone to the ethmoid bone and to the spongy bones the whole became plain." N ~t improbably deterred, however, by the In any difficulties which must have presented themselves to him, in attempting to carry out these views with due scientific so~riety,. G~ethe ~ept them to himself, or shared them only with his Immediate friends, for thirty years; the passage cited, in which they are first mentioned, bearing the date of 1820. But, in 1807, Lorenz Oken independently originated and, what is more to the point, published, those views of the vertebral composition of the skull which have since attained such world-wide celebrity; so that the great poet's silent partnership in the affair would be hardly worth mentioning were it not that his reticence bas been made the ground of severe attacks upon his honour and veracity. It has been. suggested . that Goethe, 1ull of years and of honours, thought It worth while to attempt to steal from the young Professor of J ena the fame that had accrued to him. And upon the infamy of such petty larceny the poet's latest aecuser has heaped the insinua~ion that the author of " Faust " and of "Meister " was so stupid a plagiarist, as fo copy, not only Oken's views, but his account of the manner in which he came by them. "Vaguely and Rtrangely, however, as Oken had blended the THE 'fHEORY OF THE VERTEBRATE SKULL. 281 idea with his a priori conception of the nature of the head the chance of appropriating it seems to have overcome the ~oral sense-·the least developed element in the spiritual nature-of Goethe, unless the poet deceived himself.''* "The circumstances under which the poet., in 1820 narrates having become inspired ~ith the original idea are su~piciously analogous to those descnbed by Oken in 1807, as producing the same effect on his mind."t It would be difficult to couch an offensive accusation in stronger phraseology than this ; but, by a singular chance, the scientific morality of its object has recently been fully vindi. cated. G?ethe, ~he~ in Italy, kept up a correspondence With the family of his fnend Herder. His letters have been published, and in one addressed to Madame Herder, and dated May 4, 1790, this passage occurs:- "By the oddest, happy chance, my servant picked up a bit of an animal's skull in the Jews' Cemetery at Venice, and, by way of a joke, held it out to me as if he were offering me a Jew's skull. I have made a great step in the explanation of the formation of anin1als." Can it be doubted that this "great step" is exactly that vertebral theory of which Goethe says, writing in 1820, he had as clear a view " thirty years ago ?" It is to be hoped that this evidence, which Professor Virchow has so strikingly put forward, will henceforward silence even the most virulent of Goethe's detractors, although a careful perusal of the arguments used by Mr. Lewes, in his "Life of Goethe," might have already sufficed those who were open to conviction. The idea, which dropped still-born from Goethe's mind, was, as I have said, conceived afresh by Oken, and came vigorously into the world in that remarkable discourse (occupy· ing in print about fourteen quarto pages) with which he inaugurated his professorial labours at Jena. It is hard to form a just judgment of this singular man; and, I must confess, I never read his works without thinking of the * '' Encyclopoodia Britannica," eighth edition, vol. xvi., p. 501; article. "Okcn." t lbid., p. 501. |