It might need some explanation why I venture to write this thesis about a German poet and scientist for a Hungarian University in English. To write about Goethe the ideal language is undoubtedly German. All his writings have been published numerously, all his letters, accounts, diaries are within reach (he might be the best-known individual in world history; all his private utterances, reflections and maxims have been scribbled down by faithful followers and friends). However, although reading works in German is no insurmountable difficulty, my knowledge of the language and its idioms does not allow me to write with sufficient clarity and fluency.

The next option, if not the language of the "species under investigation", should be language of the "interrogator", that is Hungarian. All of Goethe's novels and poems have been translated, usually more than once, into Hungarian. His collected works have been published by Európa Könyvkiadó in the eighties, and in the inside cover of every volume is the title "Scientific works", as a volume soon to be published. However this single volume (although it is three, thousand-page volumes in the new, 1987 German edition) has never appeared! The lack of a good, authoritative translation also implies lack of knowledge and, as far as I know no serious work appeared on Goethe as a scientist after 1916, when Dr. Túróczi-Trostler József wrote his (comparatively monumental) 38 page monograph Goethe mint természettudós (Hunyadi Nyomda, Temesvár). Meanwhile, in the world the articles devoted to Goethe's scientifíc endeavours totals at least 4,554 by 1932 and over 10,000 by the early eighties (Amrine, 1987). A good part of this literature is in English, a language, where all of Goethe's major scientific undertakings can be found in at least one reliable translation. This, together with the fact that the criticism in English tends to be less biased towards this many-faceted German giant and that English is undoubtedly the language of modern biological thought helped me in this, admittedly somewhat strange, decision.