“Classification and Development”

While the first section sheds light on the beginnings of the geosciences, the second highlights issues discussed around 1800 regarding continuity and change in nature and its systems of classification – in other words, the origins of modern biological and life sciences. Carl von Linné and his classification system based on plants’ “sexual organs” played a central role in this field. The approach was rather audacious and inspired the imagination of his contemporaries to ever higher flights of fancy. For example, Heinrich Meyer, one of Goethe’s close friends and confidants of many years, produced an illustration that rather explicitly depicted the amorous events taking place inside a flower’s calyx. The artificiality of the Linnéan system was obvious to many which resulted in numerous attempts to replace it with a more natural system based on organisms’ essential traits.

But what were these essential traits? How did they develop? Was there an archetype? A universal blueprint? Indeed, what were the defining characteristics of life, of living material, of an organism? Goethe too was occupied with these fundamental questions concerning the origin, development and classification of life. In 1790 he published his first natural-scientific paper on the topic, entitled “An Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants”. Goethe applied the word “metamorphosis” to describe the gradual development of species – a concept that was superseded by the better-known term “evolution” offered by Charles Darwin in the mid-19^th century. Following these lines of continuity, the second section of the exhibition highlights the rapidly emerging field of the biosciences around 1800.

The developments are exemplified further by Alexander von Humboldt’s “Geography of Plants”, Goethe’s discovery of the intermaxillary bone and Franz Joseph Gall’s “cranial studies”.