Past and Present

Abstract

JUST five-and-twenty years ago, the Editor of NATURE did me the honour to request that I would write the leading article for his first number. In complying with my friend's wish, I said that I could think of no more appropriate preface to a journal, the aim of which was “to mirror that fashioning by nature of a picture of herself in the mind of man,” which is called science, than an English version of the wonderful rhapsody Die Natur, which is to be found among Goethe's works,¹ and which had been a source of instruction and delight to me from my youth up.