European Romantic Review ISSN: 1050-9585 (Print) 1740-4657 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gerr20 Obsolescent Life: Goethe's Journals on Morphology Amanda Jo Goldstein To cite this article: Amanda Jo Goldstein (2011) Obsolescent Life: Goethe's Journals on Morphology, European Romantic Review, 22:3, 405-414, DOI: 10.1080/10509585.2011.564465 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10509585.2011.564465 Published online: 15 Jun 2011. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 340 View related articles Citing articles: 1 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=gerr20 European Romantic Review Vol. 22, No. 3, June 2011, 405–414 Obsolescent Life: Goethe’s Journals on Morphology Amanda Jo Goldstein* Department of Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley, California, USA European 10.1080/10509585.2011.564465 1050-9585 Taylor 2011 30Article 22 amandajo@berkeley.edu GERR_A_564465.sgm Amanda 00000June & and JoGoldstein Francis Romantic (print)/1740-4657 Francis 2011 Review (online) Goethe’s late life science project, the journal On Morphology – and the living specimens it investigated – were unusually heterogeneous and decadent forms. This piece examines Goethe’s neglected essay on the botany of “Dissipation” for the way it subverts vitalist and idealist discourses in biology to rethink living form under the aspect of its material dispersion. Here Goethe begins to substitute events that are non-procreative, but perhaps communicative, for the questions of embryogenesis and organization that had been foundational to the early life sciences. What, the morphologist asks instead, might life look like from the perspective of the particulate losses that mediate between beings? What forms of representation would be adequate to this view? Goethe’s late-career attempt to found a science of life opens with an apology for that science’s composite and provisional form: “what I, in youthful spirits, dreamt of as one work, now come[s] forward as a draft, indeed as a fragmentary collection.”1 This science took the shape of a generically miscellaneous periodical, On Morphology, issued at irregular intervals between 1817 and 1824.2 Its items not only range from gnomic epigram to osteological treatise but also erode generic bounds internally: between personal essay and scientific trial, between lyric and didactic poem, between the methods and conclusions of experiments.3 Nor are the journals temporally consistent: the “many-year-old sketches [vieljährige Skizzen]” of which the first issue’s apology warns are not just aged, but variously so, since Goethe sprinkles his own and others’ recent writings among three decades of previously unpublished and re-issued work. The result is a tissue of multiple times, marked and unmarked, which bodies forth an emphatically late biology: one that antiquates and disperses the youthful model of romantic genius a younger Goethe had helped invent, and dims the focus on new, embryonic life that had legitimated early biology as a distinct discipline.4 In this paper I make the case that the On Morphology project constitutes an experiment in non-vitalist biology: a logic of life that declines to define itself absolutely against mere matter, decay, vulnerability, or death, and declines to take organic integrity as its ideal. For what the journal’s opening “apology” frames as a formal failure – On Morphology’s status as a retroactive composite of disparate pieces and times – emerges in the periodical’s course as acutely expressive of its life-scientific knowledge. Departing from the guiding notion of seamless, teleological integration of parts and whole that had fueled two decades of philosophical and experimental research into organic form,5 the science Goethe names “morphology” sets out to address each living object – including the morphologist – as a fractious “assemblage *Email: amandajo@berkeley.edu ISSN 1050-9585 print/ISSN 1740-4657 online © 2011 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/10509585.2011.564465 http://www.informaworld.com 406 A.J. Goldstein of living and independent beings [Versammlung von lebendigen selbständigen Wesen]” (M I.1, 8). As Goethe’s methodological essays make clear, such objects solicit an empirical protocol that is not universally replicable, but exceptionally “historical,” its results sensible only after periods of latency, revision, and reception.6 At a moment when natural scientific journals were proliferating as punctual means of establishing priority of discovery, the On Morphology journal curiously foregrounds the place of obsolescence and lapsed time in the “fates” of biological texts and the living specimens and living observers they represent.7 In places, the belated and genre-bending On Morphology practices, between biology and autobiography, a form of late life writing that casts senescent decomposition not only as inevitable necessity but also as desirable method. This science and poetics of decadent self-dispersion is most graphically at work in an essay called “Dissipation, Evaporation, Effluence [Exudation]” that appeared in the Morphology journal’s third issue (1820) (M I.3, 210–21). The essay’s German title, “Verstäubung, Verdunstung, Vertropfung” plays on the work of the common verb prefix ver-, which indicates an object’s transition into the state named by the stem but can also indicate that the stem action has gone wrong: while laufen is to go in German, verlaufen is to get lost. This being a (largely) botanical essay, the first term, Verstäubung, plays darkly on the central issue of pollination, Bestäubung, letting that traditional apex of plant procreation chime instead with a verb for passively gathering dust [verstauben], and bringing into relief the place of mere dust [Staub] in the word for pollen [Blütenstaub].8 Grouping Verstäubung’s solid particles [Staub, dust], with Verdunstung’s gaseous and Vertropfung’s liquid ones [Dunst, vapor; Tropf, drop], the title follows matter through all three states, bringing botanical effluvia into touch with their inorganic correlates in physical science. Indeed, in this essay, Goethe will risk a thoroughgoing continuity between organic and inorganic being, representing its divergence as a question of timing rather than ontology. The phrase “Going to Dust, Vapor, Droplets” better translates the essay’s sense of errancy into the material, for here the morphologist turns his attention to particles emitted in obsolescence, after death, under duress, to excess, and in untimely ways that do not contribute to heterosexual reproduction. Under this nonvitally inflected heading, Goethe carves out a space for non-procreative processes within the botany of life. Trying Not to Think about Sex Goethe in fact borrows the term Verstäubung from the botanist and professor Franz Joseph Schelver (1778–1832), with whom he collaborated at Jena between 1803 and 1806. Appreciating Goethe’s subtle provocation in this essay means disentangling its ventriloquism of Schelver’s heterodox botany. Goethe opens by reflecting on the dismal reception history of Schelver’s doctrine of Verstäubung, which had amounted to an assault on the sexual paradigm in botany: an assault on the assumption – keystone of botanical classification since Linnaeus – that plants possess male and female genital organs with which they reproduce sexually at pollination, when pollen grains produced by “male” anthers fertilize “female” ovaries. Reflecting on 16 years of botanists’ resistance to Schelver’s ideas, the Goethe of the 1820 Verstäubung essay is piqued by their stubborn incapacity to think outside the sexual system. Even at this late date, in 1820, a review of a book of Schelverian botany had ended by confessing “dread.” Sexuality, the anonymous reviewer concluded, “is a European Romantic Review 407 thread that runs meaningfully and pleasantly through the whole of nature. Tear it in the Plant Kingdom, and understanding loses footing in nature and natural history (Isis 10, 667).”9 In the 1820 Verstäubung essay, Goethe confesses his prior complicity in this “Dogma of sexuality,” admitting to having urged Schelver to keep silent back in 1804, lest his “heretical” idea jeopardize Goethe’s own academic reputation by association (210). As Goethe now acknowledges, his own 1790 Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants had “religiously” adhered to the sexual system (210). Indeed, that early work – which Goethe reprinted in On Morphology’s first issue (1817) – had positioned “reproduction through two sexes” as the telos of plant life, the “apex of Nature” toward which healthy metamorphosis “ascends” (M I.1, 23–24). But by the time of the Verstäubung essay, Goethe shows himself capable not only of taking Schelver’s critique seriously but also of holding the analogy to animal hetero-sex further at bay than Schelver had ever intended to do. For in fact, Schelver’s controversial Critique of the Doctrine of the Sexes in Plants (1812) had aimed not to discard the two-gendered paradigm entirely, but to exalt masculinity as the exclusive achievement of the highest – i.e. animal – order of life. Sexually active plants were a category violation within the three-tiered hierarchy of being undergirding Schelver’s Naturphilosophie.10 This hierarchy ascended from inert mineral matter, “chained in exteriority and mass,” through plants, “striv[ing] to free themselves from the earth,” to ensouled animal life, which has “achieved in deed and power what in plants was only a drive” (74–75). Only animal life, “turning in on itself,” internalizes as sexual difference “the antithesis between male and female” that for plants manifests as a struggle between organism and environment (75, 67). Vegetable life, wrote Schelver, “never bestirs itself … never attains the male power. It is always the fertile, receptive wife of Nature, whose husband is still the general, external goad to development [Entwickelungsreitz]” – the water, warmth and light that excite seeds to life in the earth – rather than “an actual male” (66–67). Here, indeed, it becomes painfully obvious that Schelver’s critique never got far from the gendered analogy he proposed to suspend. Rather, to protect procreative masculinity as the apex of natural life, Schelver wrote a vast, assiduous botany against plant sexuality because it posited, among mere vegetables, something akin to male sperm (65). Rejecting pollination outright, Schelver argued that the moment of plant propagation takes place not in flowers, but in the ground, where general Nature excites his wifely seeds into development (73). The release of anther-pollen is not Bestäubung, procreative pollination, but Verstäubung, a climax of disintegration: the “explosion” through which the material dregs of the “old” plant are cast off to hasten the arrival of the “youthful” seed in the ground (78). As Goethe notes in his own Verstäubung essay, by denying gender difference among plants, Schelver had purified Goethean botany of the taint of “something external [ein Aüßeres]” at the scene of metamorphosis, something “interacting” within, “beside,” or “even apart from” the individual plant, which Schelver preferred to depict as “raising itself upwards … by its own force and power” (212). In revisiting the Verstäubung issue, Goethe both belatedly accepts Schelver’s invitation to question plant sexuality and gently parodies Schelver’s motives and success in doing so. Just as there are “Ultra”-liberals and “Ultra”-monarchists, he remarks, Schelver was an “Ultra” when it came to metamorphosis: “He assumes the most proper concept of healthy and regulated metamorphosis … which progresses, 408 A.J. Goldstein ennobling itself, such that everything material, low, common is little by little left behind,” permitting what is “higher, better, spiritual to emerge in great freedom” (211–12). Goethe’s own inflections of Verstäubung increasingly avoid this rhetoric of purification and transcendent interiority, following not the upward trajectory of spirit, but the lateral movements of the material “left behind.” The journals On Morphology, moreover, generally revalue that quality Schelver pejoratively ascribes to feminine vegetables – receptivity [Empfänglichkeit] – as central to the sophisticated empiricism that will succeed the self-actualizing rhetoric that had marked aesthetics and organicism in the Kantian style.11 But what Goethe seems to have found worthy of imitation in Schelver’s thinking is its perspectival inversion: with quasi-Copernican daring, Schelver’s work had designated a different point as the origin and end of the vegetable life (germination in the earth, rather than pollination in the flower). To cast a pollen grain as a particle of death rather than of prolific life – “in it,” Schelver had written, “is the moment of maturity, of death” – cedes significant space, time, and structure, to dying in the ostentatious “life” of plants. This issues a challenge to Goethe, whose Metamorphosis of Plants (1790) had given little room to death, none to decay, and pride of place to heterosexual reproduction. The apparently minor, disorderly Verstäubung essay has received little critical attention and been presented dismissively by recent editors as a “loose grouping” of observations concerning “asexual propagation in mushrooms.”12 But published on the heels of the first Metamorphosis treatise’s republication, the Verstäubung essay’s very aimlessness needs to be read as an experiment in displacing the telos of Goethean botany. Indeed, that early botany had named and expressly excluded a certain kind of metamorphosis from consideration: “accidental [zufällig] metamorphosis,” effected “from without,” which threatened to “displace our aim [Zweck].” Perhaps “an occasion will arise elsewhere to speak of these … excrescences (M I.1, 23–24).” At a distance of 30 years, the notably errant Verstäubung essay seems to constitute that occasion: here Goethe reviews botanical life without regard for its (sexual) aim, permitting a set of decadent, accidental, and fruitless excrescences to enter and reshape his conception of plant vitality.13 Goethe uses Schelver as a foil for implementing a (still risky) suspension of the analogy to human heterosex, taking “Verstäubung” as a cue to re-examine natural life under the sign of its dissipation. Here anther pollen is casually demoted to one among numerous varieties of scattering and exhalation – of saps, powders, scents, contagions and invisible influences – that the morphologist has observed among plants and animals, especially aged, diseased, and dying ones. These include plants that produce pollen-like dust or nectar-like droplets on parts other than their purported sexual organs and at times other than blossoming: after flowering, for instance, reproductively useless “pollen/dust points [Staubpunkte]” appear on the stem-leaves, not the flowers, of the Berberis shrub (212). Corn inflicted with necrosis, Goethe notes in a tone of cautious admiration, is capable of “belatedly” scattering a seemingly “endless quantity” of “black dust” (213). In lengthy case studies, Goethe investigates these emissions “that appear against the law” by delineating a complex network of circumstances external to the organism and to organic science. In the case of an old linden tree’s prolifically fruitless “exudation” – an untimely sweat of nectar that would otherwise have nourished the coming fruit – the morphologist correlates meteorological observations, the effect of temperature on the plant’s capacity to retain European Romantic Review 409 fluid, the activity of insects, and chemical analyses of the nectar from his colleague Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner (218). Here externality and accident reenter the scene of metamorphosis (formerly a dynamic play of internal tendencies), and beings change their forms according to an oblique and polyvalent set of causal relationships inconceivable through the organicist paradigm of an auto-telic power. While Schelver had risked questioning whether the plant reproduction ought to be called “sexual,” Goethe’s lush repertoire of dissipations begins to sideline reproduction altogether. The essay experiments in substituting events that are non-procreative, but perhaps communicative, for the processes of embryogenesis and organization that had been foundational to the epistemological and institutional legitimacy of the young life sciences.14 What, the morphologist asks instead, might life look like from the perspective of the particulate losses that mediate between beings? What discomposed modes of representation would be adequate to this view? Natural Simulacra The essay’s most striking instance of communicative decay is an act of fungal selfportraiture: One lays a not yet open white mushroom, with a cut stem, on a piece of white paper, and it will shortly unfold itself, and so regularly pollinate the pure surface, that the entire structure of its inner and under folds will be drawn most conspicuously; which illuminates that the Verstäubung does not occur here and there, but rather that every fold yields its portion in its native direction. (214) The case gathers together many of the improprieties evidenced in the essay’s other examples: the mushroom performs an unwilled and untimely emission that will produce no progeny; it does so not from a dedicated sexual organ, but from “each fold” of its body; and this act is occasioned by external circumstances and concurrent with the mushroom’s decomposition. But the graphic success of this act emerges as powerfully here as its reproductive futility: dying, this mushroom makes an image of itself – “draw” [zeichnen] is the verb Goethe uses – so that “the whole structure of its inner and under folds” can be seen “conspicuously” on the white paper. Our twenty-first century surprise at this stems from Goethe’s literal and matter-offact treatment of an act of nonhuman representation. Though metaphors of Nature as artist or artisan abound in natura naturans philosophies, in such rhetoric a particular fungal shape is itself the artwork: a mode of Nature’s unitary, plastic artistry. (There is plenty of this in Goethe.) But here a particular white mushroom, quite cut off, is caught projecting its likeness on paper. Nor can it be said that a human observer is needed to do the cutting and catching: in a pun never lost in these botanical writings, pieces of paper are called, as in English, leaves [Blätter], so that the various powders, vapors, and droplets that accumulate on (plant) leaves as the essay progresses only reinforce the suggestion that there are forms of drawing, painting, and printing at work that are indifferent to the morphologist’s looking. While there are undeniably elements of organicist rhetoric here – one could point to the emphasis on self-reproduction and to the wholeness of the image – it is important that in this accidental likeness particles behave neither like totipotent epigenetic germs (each productive of a whole organism) nor like unfolding preformist seeds (each containing an organism in miniature). Instead, by chance and by aggregate, they make a reproduction in another medium: a granular, atomized image in dust (like charcoal, pencil, or chalk), rather than in flesh. 410 A.J. Goldstein In fact, once the mushroom has graphically revealed the possibility, a pattern emerges throughout the essay’s loose catalogue: often, in “acts of scattering dust” (or vapor, or droplets), things leave images on each other’s surfaces. Goethe’s attention had been attracted, for instance, to the linden tree’s excessive honeydew because the tree had so “regularly spritzed [regelmäßig gespritzt]” the stones beneath with its “glossy” and “gummy Points” that it produced a circle of “laquered [lackiert]” gravel mirroring the circumference of its branches (216–17). After the mushroom’s sporeprint comes an example of animal Verstäubung in dying flies: “by and by [they] spray a white dust from themselves,” with “ever increasing elasticity … so that the fine dust shows its traces over an increasing distance, until the resulting nimbus measures an inch across” (214, n. 245). The mushroom episode has another notable effect: though initially given as an example of Verstäubung, the middle of the passage temporarily drops the Ver- prefix that had connoted “irregularity” to report that the mushroom will “regularly pollinate [regelmäßig bestäuben]” the paper-leaf on which it lies. In the next sentence, the term Verstäubung returns, but in de-pathologized form: it now describes a “regular” and thorough full-body activity that just happens to land on paper instead of soil, thus producing a picture instead of progeny. The easy vacillation between “pollination” and “dissipation” – polemical antitheses in Schelver’s botany – reveals the extent to which the question of the pollen’s male sexual potency has diminished in importance. This communication is no longer indexed to genital sex, but to the essay’s diverse catalogue of particulate attritions; as well as to what Theresa Kelley has aptly named Romantic botany’s “wayward exfoliating contingency,” its figural and factual resistance to (its own) taxonomic and totalizing impulses.15 Here the stark antinomy between organic and inorganic being (mineral, textual, or dead) gives way to a situational dependency: a particle’s status as germ, dust, or grapheme simply depends – upon reception, configuration, and timing – rather than an inherent power or impotence. At stake is a kind of equivocal corporeality, a materialism that, as Natania Meeker writes in another context, “does not find its own origins in the split between representation and things-in-themselves” (11).16 The mushroom’s spore print is a particularly “conspicuous” and artful item on a continuum of particulate effluences that are characteristic of botanical bodies subject to time, weather, influence, and interaction: Goethe lists the “effluvia” that “take shape as oil, gum, and sap on leaves, twigs, stems, and trunks” the “delicate exhalations” upon which insects feed and the ones that make a plum “appear blue to our eye” (219–20). The catalogue concludes by attesting to the insensible but consequential “atmospheric element[s]” that communicate “reciprocal activity from plant to plant” (220). Passing from the graphic clarity of the mushroom’s spore-print, to the cloud-form (“nimbus”) emitted by the dying fly, to these insensible influences, Goethe’s essay begins a life science of the material atmosphere between beings (morphologists included) – an atmosphere laden with everything from odors to images.17 Writing Decadent Life Channelling the “Ultra”-organicist Schelver, the essay’s opening sentence had positioned decadent activity as a fleeting, self-negating instant in the service of Life’s ceaseless forward march: perhaps one could legitimately view the three titular decompositions, Verstäubung, Verdunstung, Vertropfung, “as symptoms of an European Romantic Review 411 Organization progressing inexorably forward, hurrying from life to life, yes, through annihilation [Vernichtung] to life” (210). But Goethe cannot, like Schelver, challenge the heterosexuality of plant generation while leaving the life sciences’ founding fixation on generation (“from life to life”) intact. Instead, his essay delays the vitalist juggernaut that would hurtle “through annihilation to life” by dilating, indeed, expending its whole length, on the specific instances of “annihilation” that such a notion of supra-individual Organization would subsume. As this happens, the Life/organization – Death/decomposition binary relaxes, and a range of activities come into view that are neither heterosexually reproductive, nor definitively selfdestructive. They are, as Goethe puts it, “productive in an abnormal way” – not of offspring, but of representations, communications, influences, and perceptions. In disorganizing acts of going to dust, vapor, or droplets, things leave their shapes on neighboring surfaces and scatter their influence into the air. By the end of the “Verstäubung, Verdunstung, Vertropfung” essay, “from life to life” has come to connote not the frighteningly inexorable forward march of the species through particular, disposable embodiments, but the lateral transmissions between beings that share the same time. One notices in Goethe’s rhetoric a careful admiration for this casting-off of material, an “elastic” ability that actually seems to increase with the body’s age.18 I want to suggest, in closing, that Verstäubung constitutes not just a late scientific interest for Goethe, but also a late poetics – an “art of losing,” in Elizabeth Bishop’s words19 – that ceases to intend creative generation of whole, self-sufficient works in favor of acts of serial self-dispersion. Just as the late morphology forgoes the teleological version of “life” advocated by organicist biology, the late style forgoes the analogy between aesthetic and organic forms, situating itself, instead, among the events of communicative, material dispersion that define embodied transience.20 Like many of the most dramatic Verstäubungsakte [acts] of the plants and animals in the essay, the untimely release of the journals On Morphology was instigated by circumstances of duress. Goethe would never have cast his views “into the ocean of opinions,” he writes in the opening “apology” with which we began: … if we had not, in the hours of danger just passed, so vividly felt the value to us of those papers on which we were earlier moved to set down a piece of our being. So let that which, in a youthful mood, I often dreamt of as one work, come forward as a draft, even a fragmentary collection, and work and be of use as it is … Jena, 1807. (M I.1, 6) The On Morphology periodicals themselves constitute a serial issue of obsolescent life-pieces. And the temporal address affixed below – “Jena, 1807” – has a peculiar effect. This prefatory text appears for the first time in 1817, in On Morphology’s first issue, and so the date antiquates by a decade the passages the reader has just absorbed. 1807 also specifies the “hours of danger” to which Goethe alludes, tying the project’s inception to the aftermath of the battles of Jena-Aeurstädt. Weimar was plundered after this unexpectedly swift and embarrassing defeat by Napolean’s forces of the Fourth Coalition’s Prussians; the battles both laid bare German civic and military belatedness relative to French modernity and marked the local beginning of the end for the ancien régime.21 For Goethe, these “hours of danger” occasioned a newly provisional and dispersive approach to the science and writing of “life,” one keen to keep mortality and senescence at its center, and sensitive to the way a punctual address to the historical present might be shot through with old and distant things. 412 A.J. Goldstein Acknowledgments I am grateful to Kevis Goodman and Tom McEnaney for their invaluable suggestions for revising this essay, and to Steve Goldsmith and Anne-Lise François for their comments on its longer version. Thanks to the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the DAAD for their support. Notes 1. “Das Unternehmen wird Entschuldigt [The Undertaking Is Excused],” Zur Morphologie [On 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. Morphology] (hereafter M), I.1, 6, Leopoldina Ausgabe (LA), Abt. 1, Bd. 9. Translations from Goethe and other naturalists are my own, although English selections from On Morphology are available in Mueller; for the most consequential translation difference, see n. 8 below. On Morphology constitutes one half of a double periodical whose full title reads On Natural Science in General, On Morphology in Particular. Despite separate bindings, its halves On Natural Science and On Morphology dissolve their apparently tidy division between inorganic and inorganic inquiry: the science of shape shifting that living beings elicit for Goethe extends past them to encompass many of life’s purported opposites, while optics and meteorology infiltrate On Morphology’s method of observing life. See Holland’s insightful comparison of Goethe’s prose and elegiac versions of plant metamorphosis, 19–55. From William Harvey’s De Generatione Animalium (1651) to the works Goethe takes up in On Morphology (Wolfe, Blumenbach, etc.), the sciences of life emergent in the very long eighteenth century were above all sciences of generation: their foundational controversies concerned the ontological status and formative powers of genital material. For a deft overview see Roe, and Jacob’s classic study. Kant discerned contemporary naturalists’ governing idea of organism as auto-telic “causal nexus” in his third Critique: “both cause and effect of itself,” the organism invites teleological thinking as its heuristic corollary. Kant endorsed Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s catching coinage, Bildungstrieb [Formative Drive], for this extraordinary agency (§64): Blumenbach had insisted on “the powerful gulf that nature has fixed between the animate and inanimate creation, between the organized and inorganic creatures” (80, 89). On the Kantian tradition in German biology see Lenoir, and Müller-Sievers’s trenchant critique of autopoetic ideology. For an erudite view of Goethean metamorphosis as “progressive selfdifferentiation” within the organicist tradition, see Pfau. See “Bedeutende Fördernis durch ein einziges geistreiches Wort [Meaningful Progress Through a Single Witty Word],” M II.1, 307–10. I allude to the essays “Fate of the Manuscript” and the “Fate of the Publication” that accompanied Goethe’s republication of his 1790 Metamorphosis of Plants treatise in On Morphology’s first issue (1817). See von Mücke’s fruitful reading of On Morphology and the emergent polarization between literary and scientific author-functions. On periodical form around 1800, see Lepenies’s classic exposition (97–114), and Koranyi (115–32). Citing this essay, the GDW gives the Latin dissipatio for Verstäubung: “auflösung, zersetzung in die bestandtheile.” Schelver’s potentially “heretical” subversion has been neutralized for readers of English by the term Verstäubung’s translation as “pollination” in Meuller. The book was Schelver’s son-in-law August Henschel’s Von der Sexualität der Pflanzen; Isis’s editor Lorenz Oken is the review’s likely author. I am indebted to Kuhn’s characteristically fine editorial notes for this and numerous hints to the essay, LA II, 10A, ss. 825–31. See Bach on Schelver’s specific contribution to Romantic Naturphilosophie. The title of a table in the first issue of On Natural Science in General – “Eye, receptive and reactive [Auge, empfänglich und gegenwirkend]” – glosses receptivity as an epistemic virtue. The “Meaningful Progress” essay (n. 6) more elaborately celebrates the morphologist’s susceptibility to transfiguration by the object under view: “Every new object, well seen, opens a new organ in us [Jeder neue Gegenstand, wohl beschaut, schließt ein neues Organ in uns auf]” (M II.1, 307). Becker et al., Münchner Ausgabe, 999. See Breidbach’s brief but illuminating analysis, 244–48. European Romantic Review 413 13. Kelley perceptively diagnosed these contingent metamorphoses as already “hover[ing]” at 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. “the edges of the Metamorphosis essay.” In the Verstäubung essay, they are permitted to occupy center stage. See Kelley, “Restless Romantic Plants,” 190. See Foucault, Jacob, and Canguilhem’s seminal theses about the emergence of “life” as a distinct epistemological object around 1800; also Reill, Caron and Wolfe. Kelley, “Romantic Nature,” 202. In a larger project, I link this permissively textual, vital, and material corporeality to Goethe’s involvement in the first full German verse-translation of Lucretius’ De rerum natura. Meeker’s study beautifully unfolds the French Enlightenment inflections of Lucretian figural materialism. See Mitchell’s resonant essay on “mutual atmospheres” in romantic botany, centered on the particular allure of Cryptogamia (such as mushrooms); Goethe’s essay mischievously threatens to relegate all pollen to this catch-all class for reproductive misfits. With “Elasticity” Goethe intends the “property of spontaneous expansion,” rather than the now familiar sense of springy shape-retention (OED, no GDW listing). “One Art,” Geography III. This suggestion finds its finest elaboration in Piper’s study of romantic media history, which shows Goethe redefining the novel “as something material, processual, and spatially dispersed” (25, 1–51). Azzouni’s and Blechschmidt’s studies also thicken our account of Goethe’s constructivist, rather than expressivist, poetics. Schwartz 15–40. References Azzouni, Safia. Kunst als praktischer Wissenschaft: Goethes Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre und die Hefte Zur Morphologie. Köln/Weimar/Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2005. Print. Bach, Thomas “Für wen das hier gesagte nicht gesagt ist … Franz Joseph Schelvers Beitrag zur Naturphilosophie um 1800.” Naturwissenschaften um 1800: Wissenschaftskultur in Jena-Weimar. Ed. Olaf Breidbach and Peter Ziche. Weimar: Böhlhaus, 2001. 65–82. Print. Bishop, Elizabeth. Geography III. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976. Print. Blechschmidt, Stefan. Goethes Lebendige Archiv: Mensch-Morphologie-Geschichte. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2009. Print. 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