Goethe as a Scientist

Heidelberger wrote this paper on the German Neo-Classicist and Romantic novelist, poet, scientist, and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) as a first-year graduate student in organic chemistry at Columbia University.

The intermaxillary bone is the center bone of the upper jaw, and contains the incisor teeth. Its presence in the human body was claimed by Galen and his followers, but was refuted by Caesalius and his followers, neither side trying to demonstrate its hypothesis anatomically. Goethe's idea of unity in Nature made hi sure that as man possessed incisor teeth, the bone existed in the human race and as a consequence of this idea, he started to compare the skulls of various animals and human beings in various stages of development. By this method of comparative anatomy he found that "the bone varied with the nutrition of the animal and the size of its teeth. He found, moreover, that in some animals the bone was not separated from the jaw, and that in children the sutures were traceable." He also found distinct traces of sutures on the interior of the fully devel--