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Goethe and the Intermaxillary Bone

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

George A. Wells
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Extract

Johann Wolfgang Goethe* (1749–1832) believed that in 1784 he demonstrated the presence of the intermaxillary (premaxillary) bone in man, and that after a certain amount of opposition professional anatomists accepted his findings. This paper tries to show what the anatomical facts are, what it was that Goethe discovered, how his beliefs about his contribution and influence arose, and how his discovery is related to his general scientific aims and methods.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 3 , Issue 4 , December 1967 , pp. 348 - 361
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 1967

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References

* Goethe is quoted from the Weimar edn. Pt. II, containing his scientific writings in 13 vols. Goethes Werke, hrsg. im Auftrage der Grossherzogin Sophie von Sachsen, II Abtheilung (Weimar, 1890–1904), hereinafter designated WA.

1 It was because the upper incisors are always situated in the premaxilla that Albrecht von Haller (1708–1777) named it the os incivisum. See his Bibliotheka Anatomica (London, 1748), i, 177. But Blumenbach considered the name os intermaxillare preferable, since the bone may be present even though the upper incisors are absent, as in cattle, the elephant, and the two-horned African rhinocerus. De generis humani varietate natura (3rd edn., 1795) in The Anthropological Treatises of Blumenbach, Eng. trans. Bendysche, T. (London, 1865), 176.Google Scholar

2 Oeuvres d'histoire naturelle de Goethe, trad. Martins, C. F. (Paris, 1837).Google Scholar The translator justly notes in his preface that “les figures sont la copie fidèle des dessins originaux, sauf l'exécution qui est infiniment plus parfaite”. He adds: “Les planches anatomiques, en particulier, ont été refaites par M.Jacob, en présence de préparations sèches qu'elles sont destinées à représenter.”

3 Vesalius, , Carporis humani fabrica (2nd edn., Basel, 1555), 51–52Google Scholar: Albinus, , Icones ossium foetus humani (Lugd. Batav., 1737)Google Scholar, Tab. V, fig. 33m; and Tabulae sceleti et musculorum carporis humani (Lugd. Batav., 1747)Google Scholar, Tab. XII, fig. 9. The history of research (both before and after Goethe) is summarized by Disselhorst, R., “Goethes anatomische Studien”, Goethe als Seher und Erforscher der Natur, ed. Walther, J. (Halle, 1930)Google Scholar, 232 ff. A much fuller account, with copious quotations from the original sources, is given by Leuckart, F. S. (a pupil of Blumenbach) in his Untersuchungen über das Zwischenkieferbein in seiner normalen und abnormen Metamorphose (Stuttgart, 1840).Google Scholar That the history of research was well known to the contemporary authorities to whom Goethe appealed is indicated by Blumenbach, 's references in his Geschichte und Beschreibung der Knochen des menschlichen Körpers (Göttingen, 1786), 194–195Google Scholar, where he mentions relevant remarks by Vesalius, Falloppia, Riolan and others. In my account I have stressed the work of Vesalius and Albinus because it was known to Goethe when he wrote his paper; and also that of Vicq d'Azyr, who linked his views on the premaxilla with his idea of the unity of nature. This does not emerge from the surveys of Disselhorst (who makes no mention of Vicq d'Azyr) and Leuckart, although it is briefly stated by Russell, E. S., Form and Function (London, 1916), 45.Google Scholar

4 “Observations anatomiques sur trois singes appellés le Mandrill, le Callitriche et le Macque”, Histoire de l'Académie Royale des Sciences, Année 1780 (Paris, 1784)Google Scholar, Mémoires, 488–489. In his Traité d'anatomie (Paris, 1786), 25Google Scholar, he mentions “un os que j'ai décrit sur le nom d'incisif ou labial, que quelques uns appellent intermaxillaire, que l'on a découvert depuis peu dans les morses [walruses], et dont j'ai reconnu les traces dans les os maxillaires supérieurs du foetus humain”. According to Victor Franz, “on” means Goethe, of whose discovery of the bone in the walrus Vicq d'Azyr had been informed by letter from Camper. See “Goethes anatomischzoologische Studien”, Forschungen und Fortschritte, viii (1932), 99.Google Scholar

5 See his review of Hilaire, E. Geoffroy Saint's Principes de Philosophie Zoologique (Paris, 1830), WA vii, 193.Google Scholar

6 The Antecedents of Man (Edinburgh, 1959), 162.Google Scholar

7 Naturgeschichte des Orang-Utang, German trans. Herbell, (Düsseldorf, 1791), 182.Google Scholar The Dutch original was published at Amsterdam in 1782. Camper's view that the absence of the bone is a specifically human character, due to the nature of the facial angle in man, was reiterated by Fischer, Gotthelf, Über die verschiedene Form des Intermaxillarknochens (Leipzig, 1800), 29–30.Google Scholar

8 Eng. trans, cit. (1), 92.

9 In WA viii, 91, it is entitled Versuch aus der vergleichenden Knochenlehre dass der Zwischenknochen der oberen Kinnlade dem Menschen mit den übrigen Thieren gemein sei.

10 Ibid., 119.

11 Bd. I (Weimar, 1803), piate VI, figs. 3 and 28. Kohlbrugge, J. H. F. “Historischkritische Studien über Goethe als Naturforscher”, Zoolog. Annalen, v, (1913), 92Google Scholar, complains that, in deference to Goethe's views Loder has drawn the suture in Fig. 3 more distinctly than it ever normally appears. But Professor J. T. Aitken of London University has kindly shown me a standard teaching skull in which the suture line can be seen exactly as it is in Loder's drawing. Kohlbrugge also alleges that Fig. 28 is an embryonic form, that Loder never depicts embryos except in his drawings of the upper jaw, and that the purpose of such deviation from his normal practice was to indulge in some special pleading for the theory of his famous pupil. But in fact Fig. 28 is not drawn from an embryo, nor is it true that the only figures in the Plate that depict upper jaws (some show the embryonic condition of e.g. the mandible). In his animus against “incense bearers” (p. 104) who inflate the importance of Goethe's scientific work, Kohlbrugge mars his excellent monograph (to which I am deeply indebted) with a contrary exaggeration.

12 All the letters to Merck mentioned in this paper are given in Wagner, Karl's Briefe an Merck (Darmstadt, 1835).Google Scholar On the walrus cf. (4) above.

13 Op. cit. (5), 195.

14 Ibid., 194; also op. cit. (9), 119.Google Scholar For Kohlbrugge's defence of Camper see op. cit. (11), 14.Google Scholar

15 Blumenbach, for instance, expressly says that the intermaxillary bone is “in all [animals possessing it] distinguished by its own sutures from the neighbouring bones of the skull”. These sutures, he adds, include the facial one (Eng. trans, cit. (1), 176). Camper had assigned the bone to the orang and denied it to man specifically on the evidence of the facial suture. He wrote that the orang's “upper jaw is divided into two, so that a suture runs from the nasal cavity to between the canine and incisor tooth, as is the case with all apes, dogs, cats, lions and ruminants, even though the latter have no upper incisors”. He added that this division of the upper jaw suffices to class the orang among the quadrumana, for “I possess in my collection skulls of Negroes, Hottentots, Chinese and new-born and unborn European children, and have never seen in them any trace of this division”. Kleinere Schriften, I (ii), German trans. Herbell, (Leipzig, 1784), 93–94.Google Scholar

16 Having referred to the passages from Blumenbach and Camper quoted in (15), Goethe makes this statement while conceding the absence of the facial suture in man. He correlates its absence with the facial angle, saying that while the premaxilla is “pushed so far to the fore in animals, it is reduced in man to very small proportions. If one studies the skull of a child or of an embryo one will see how the teeth in their growth exert such a force on these parts and subject the bone fabric to such tension that nature has to exert all her strength to keep these parts in intimate union. Contrast this with an animal's skull, where the incisors are so far forwards that their pressure—either on each other or on the canine tooth—is not so strong”. Op. cit. (9), 101.Google Scholar

17 For details see Kohlbrugge, , op. cit. (11), 93, 108.Google Scholar

18 Erster Entwurf einer allgemeinen Einleitung in die vergleichende Anatomie, ausgehend von der Osteologie (written 1795, published in Zur Morphologie, 1820), WA viii, 35–36.Google Scholar

19 Man as an animal (London, 1957), 52.Google Scholar

20 Op. cit. (6), 162 n.

21 Lehre von den Knochen und Bändern des menschlichen Körpers, 2nd edn. (Frankfurt, 1800), 201–202.Google Scholar

11 See for instance Kalischer, S., “Goethe als Naturforscher”, in Bielschowsky, A., Goethe, 18th edn. (Munich, 1910), ii, 420Google Scholar, for the statement that “Sömmerring and Blumenbach were gradually converted” to Goethe's view. Many other scholars have said the same: e.g. Disselhorst, , op. cit. (3), 232Google Scholar; Broekman, R. W., “Goethe ab Wissenschaftler”, Zahnärztliche Rundschau, xlv (1936), 1504Google Scholar; and Pfannenstiel, M., “Die Entdeckung des menschlichen Zwischenkiefers durch Goethe und Oken”, Die Naturwissenschaften, xxxvi (1949), 194.Google Scholar

23 Op. cit. (5), 195–196.Google Scholar

24 We saw above that in the and edn. of his De generis humani varietate he held that the bone is present in all apes but absent from man, the elephant, the ant-eater and the dolphin. In the 3rd edn. of 1795 he drops the denial concerning the last three of these mammals, says that whether it is present in all apes requires further investigation, but still affirms its absence from man (Eng. trans, cit. (1) 176). In his Handbuch der vergleichenden Anatomie (Göttingen, 1805), 22Google Scholar, he again says that man has all his upper teeth in the maxilla in contrast to most other mammals. He adheres to this position in the 3rd edn. of this work (Göttingen, 1824), saying (p. 22) that in man the two bones of the upper jaw abut against each other anteriorly to form a nasal spine, whereas in “other mammals” they are separated by a pair of intermaxillary bones wedged between them. By this date Goethe's paper had been published, and Blumenbach added in a note (to p. 24) that Goethe has shown “to what extent the [palatal] suture demarks what must be regarded as a rudiment of an intermaxillary bone”. The statement by Kiesselbach, A. (“Goethes Zwischenkieferstudien”, Medizinische Monatsschrift, ii (1948), 430)Google Scholar that Blumenbach changed his ground and accepted Goethe's view in this 3rd edn. is not correct. As late as 1830 (in his Handbuch der Naturgeschichte, Göttingen, 44n) Blumenbach referred to his words of 1795 as representing his opinion.

25 Blumenbach's letters of 24 March and 5 May 1781, given in Wagner, R., Sömmerrings Leben und Verkehr mit seinen Zeitgenossen (Leipzig, 1844), 297–298.Google Scholar

26 Op. cit. (9), 109–110, 111.Google Scholar Only after 1844, when Blumenbach's letters were published (25) was it possible to identify him as the author of these extracts, as did Virchow, R., Goethe als Naturforscher (Berlin, 1861), 75.Google Scholar But most writers have not only failed to identify the author but even to realize that Goethe was quoting some unnamed authority. Thus even Leuckart, , op. cit. (3), 11Google Scholar, gives the extracts as the work of Goethe, and many writers have inferred from them that Goethe dissected embryos!

27 Op. cit. (21), 3rd edn. hrsg. Wagner, R. (Leipzig, 1839)Google Scholar, 66n.

28 Goethe, , op. cit. (9), 123–124.Google ScholarSpix, , Cephalogenesis (Monarchii, 1815), 19.Google Scholar

29 Nachträge zur Farbenlehre, WA v (i), 322–323.Google Scholar

30 “Goethe and Evolution”, Journal of the History of Ideas, xxviii, No. 4 (10 1967).Google Scholar

31 Op. cit.(18), 34.Google Scholar

32 Ibid., 39, 57: Versuch über die Gestalt der Thiere (an MS. of 1790), WA viii, 268.Google Scholar

33 Op. cit. (9), 130.Google Scholar

34 Ibid., 102. Op. cit. (18), 24.Google Scholar

35 Vorträge über die ersten drei Capitel des Entwurfs (written 1796, published in Zur Morphologie, 1820), WA viii, 73.Google ScholarRussell, E. S., op. cit. (3), 51Google Scholar, has commented that “such an interpretation of the unity of plan reaches perhaps beyond the bounds of science”. The eminent palaeontologist O. Abel noted that the fossil record and the idea of evolution—the former not available to Goethe, and the latter unimportant to his mind—have only recently enabled us to form a tolerably clear idea of a primitive reptile, bird or mammal; and that Goethe's quest for an archetype which should represent all vertebrate forms was thus necessarily unsuccessful. He also tells of Goethe's attempts (still to be seen in the Weimar museum) to homologize the skeletons of birds and man, and says they are “in some ways reminiscent of the ghostly visions of St. Antony”. “Goethe und die Biologie”, Biologia Generalis, ix (1932), 18.Google Scholar

36 Zur Morphologie. Verfolg (WA vi, 348)Google Scholar; cf. Bildungstrieb (WA vii, 71–72).Google Scholar

37 Cuvier met thinking of this kind in the writings of the German “Naturphilosophen”, and answered it effectively even without disputing its teleological premiss. He “replied that nature, meaning of course the creative hand behind nature, was free to produce whatever was necessary for die specific needs of each individual, and if this entailed the violation of a supposed unity of organic nature, then so much the worse for the latter”. Coleman, W., Cuvier, Zoologist (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), 151CrossRefGoogle Scholar, with a reference to one of Cuvier's manuscripts.

38 Op. cit. (18), 37Google Scholar; op. cit. (29), 268.Google Scholar

39 Op. cit. (18), 37Google Scholar; Op. cit. (5), 2O1–2O2.Google Scholar

40 Beschreibung des Zwischenknochens mehrerer Thiere bezüglich auf die beliebte Eintheilung und Terminologie (written 1784–1786), WA viii, 140.Google Scholar

41 Op. cit. (5), 197.Google Scholar

42 Op. cit. (18), 43.Google Scholar

43 Op. cit. (5), 204.Google Scholar

44 Op. cit. (18), 8, 16Google Scholar; op. cit. (5), 198–199.Google Scholar The many parallel passages in Goethe and E. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire are recorded by Martins, , op. cit. (2), 433 ff.Google Scholar

45 See e.g. his poem Athroismos (a variant of Metamorphose der Thiere), W A viii, 59–60, which may well be based on Aristotle, , De partibus animalium, 663 b35–664 a3, Eng. trans. Ogle, W. (London, 1882), 63.Google Scholar

46 Origin of Species, ed. Condor, (London, 1950), 128Google Scholar (ch. V).

47 Op. cit. (18), 17–18.Google Scholar Sir Richard Owen, the last great pre-Darwinian, reasoned on remarkably similar lines in his On the Nature of the Limbs (London, 1849), 85–86, where he argued that nature produced animal forms from an archetypal idea, and that those parts of animals which appear to have been “made in vain” are in fact illustrations of the design manifested in the archetype. On the other hand, the opponents of the archetype theory had no sympathy with Goethe's principle of compensation. Thus T. Magdeleine de Saint-Agy criticized it sharply in Cuvier, 's Histoire des sciences naturelles (Paris, 1845), v, 318Google Scholar (written to complete the work after Cuvier's death), saying that, if Goethe were right, ant-bears, which are without teeth, ought to have horns.

48 Oken credited man with the premaxilla because he saw the palatal suture in a number of children's skulls: Über die Bedeutung der Schädelknochen (Jena, 1807), 14, and Pfannenstiel, op. cit. (22). Bräuning-Oktavio, H., Oken und Goethe (Weimar, 1959), 33–35Google Scholar, has shown that he certainly knew of Goethe's essay at this time.

49 Leuckart, , op. cit. (3), 91.Google Scholar Owen expressly says that in man the maxillary bone includes the superior maxillary and premaxillary of the lower animals, and that the two coalesce early in the life-history of the human individual. On the Archetype and homologies of the vertebrate skeleton (London, 1848), 141, 193.Google Scholar Earlier in this work (p. 8) he expressly refers to Goethe's “determination … of the special homology of that anterior part of the human upper maxillary bone which is separated by a more or less extensive suture from the rest of the bone in the foetus”.

50 Ibid., 146.

51 Das Schädelgerüst aus Wirbelknochen auferbaut (published in Zur Morphologie, 1824), WA viii, 167.Google Scholar