Flora Unveiled

442 i Flora Unveiled

most seductive, and for the heart of a woman, the most dangerous man” she would ever
meet.^39 And Goethe did not disappoint. He was “maddeningly impetuous and foolish with
her, trampling on her sensitivities, and shocking her with his ribald jokes and vulgarities.”^40
Her constant efforts to reform him provoked sheepish apologies but had no lasting effect.
She was flattered by the constant outpouring of his passionate love letters, as exemplified by
the following passage:

Why should I plague you! Lovely creature! Why do I deceive myself and plague you,

and so on— We can be nothing to one another and are too much to one another.—

Believe me when I speak as clear as crystal to you; you are so close to me in all things.—

But since I  see things only as they are, that makes me crazy. Good night angel and

good morning. I  do not wish to see you again— Except— You know everything— I

have my heart— Anything I could say is quite stupid. — I will look at you just as a man

watches the stars— think about that.^41

As with Goethe’s earlier soul- mates, Goethe conflated the Baroness with Cornelia, writ-
ing a poem to her that included the lines:

Oh, you were in ancient times

my sister or my wife.^42

Their friendship took on a sacramental nature, and, in 1780, she even sent him a ring
to seal their spiritual bond. However, toward the end of their decade- long relationship,
Goethe grew restive; he began to yearn for something more than a spiritual bond: “I should
wish that there was some oath or sacrament that bound me obviously and legally to you,” he
confessed. But despite his importuning, the Baroness had no intention of abandoning her
marriage and position, or risking her children’s security. For his part, Goethe would never
have jeopardized their friendship in a clumsy attempt at seduction.
In the meantime, Goethe was developing a keen interest in morphology, the study of the
principles of form in biological development, a path that would eventually lead him to the
question of sex in plants.

Goethe and the Premaxillary Bone

Goethe’s foray into biology began in 1780 after attending a series of anatomical demon-
strations given by Justus Christian Loder, the distinguished professor of medicine at Jena.
Soon he was studying comparative anatomy in Loder’s laboratory. The fact that all verte-
brates shared many features in common was widely understood at the time. The question
was:  Why? The Darwinian answer is, of course, that vertebrates are all descended from a
common ancestor, but the concept of phylogenetic trees was not yet known. Goethe favored
the Neoplatonic idea that Nature, directed by God, had formed all vertebrate animals based
on a single plan or archetype. He wrote, “nature proceeds from ideas, just as man follows an
idea in all he undertakes.”^43
Goethe was especially proud of his discovery of the presence of the premaxillary bone
in the upper jaws of humans. The premaxillary bone is that segment of the upper jaw that