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17
Sex and the Single Cryptogam
Goethe and the nature philosophers had gained many adherents to their Neoplatonic
view of plant morphology, but, for the most part, German scientists took a jaundiced view
of Goethe’s idealism and considered his Metamorphosis inferior to Caspar Friedrich Wolff ’s
Theoria Generationis (1759).
Foremost among the detractors of Naturphilosophie was Matthias Jacob Schleiden,
Professor of Botany at the University of Jena. Born in Hamburg, in 1804, Schleiden obtained
his doctorate in law in 1826 and promptly set up practice in his hometown. However, the
anxiety of dealing with the legal system was apparently too much for him, and he suffered
from chronic, debilitating depression. In 1831, following a failed suicide attempt using a
pistol, which left a noticeable scar on his forehead, he quit law and moved to Göttingen to
study medicine at the university. At Göttingen, as at other universities, a thorough ground-
ing in botany remained foundational to the study of medicine, and there he acquired a taste
for it.^1 Impatient to indulge his new passion, Schleiden moved to Berlin without complet-
ing his medical degree, to study with Johann Horkel, a physician and plant physiologist.
Horkel, a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences who was also Schleiden’s uncle,
seems to have exerted the greatest influence on him.^2
By 1840, Schleiden was so well thought of in botanical circles that he was offered the
chair of botany at Jena, Goethe’s former university. Possibly the administration hoped that
Schleiden, an ardent opponent of Naturphilosophie, would help to counteract whatever
damage Goethe had done to the credibility of the sciences at Jena. However, some faculty
members objected to Schleiden’s appointment because his doctorate was in law rather than
medicine. To appease his critics, Schleiden stayed on in Berlin long enough to obtain doc-
torates in both philosophy and medicine, after which he made the move to Jena.^3 But before
he could get settled into his new post, he suffered a second mental breakdown and made