284 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
cemetery in Venice" (1823 essay, in Mueller and Engard, 1952, p. 237); and (2) his
discovery of the human premaxillary bone in 1784, based on its presence in other
mammals and his convictions about unity of type. (Goethe called this bone the
intermaxilare; others referred to it as "Goethe's bone." In an essay written in 1832,
the year of his death, Goethe recalled this discovery as "the first battle and the first
triumph of my youth" (Goethe, 1832, p. 573).)
But Goethe chose botany for his most extensive study in formalism, and
probably his finest contribution to science. In this important work, Goethe applied
to plants the same vision that Geoffroy and Owen would later advance in trying to
reduce the great complexity and diversity of animal (or at least vertebrate) form to
the single generating pattern of an archetypal vertebra (see Geoffroy, 1831, for a
homage to Goethe). For Goethe, the leaf represented an archetypal form for all
plant parts growing from the central