Goette, Alexander Wilhelm

(b. St. Petersburg, Russia, 31 December 1840; d. Heidelberg, Germany, 5 February 1922)

zoology.

Goette was the son of Ernst Bernhard Goette, a physician and counselor of state in St. Petersburg, and the former Natalie Bagh. He studied medicine at the University of Dorpat from 1860 to 1865 and completed his training with an M.D. degree at the University of Tübingen under Franz Leydig. Goette then worked as an independent scholar and in 1872 qualified as a lecturer under the Strasbourg zoologist Oscar Schmidt, at the same time becoming an assistant in the Zoological Institute of the University of Strasbourg. Named an associate professor in 1877, he took the additional post in 1880 of director of the zoological collection of the Municipal Museum of Strasbourg. From 1882 to 1886 Goette was professor of zoology at the University of Rostock. He was called back to Strasbourg in 1886 as Schmidt’s successor. In 1918 he left Strasbourg and spent his last years in Heidelberg.

Following several minor investigations in vertebrate embryology, Goette’s principal work, Die Entwicklungsgeschichte der Unke (Bombinator igneus) als Grundlage einer vergleichenden Morphologie der Wirbelthiere, appeared in 1875. Along with a detailed description of the development of the organs of Bombinator igneus, he gave a detailed presentation of his ideas of the methods and problems of ontogenetic research. In opposition to the dominant phylogenetic interpretation of embryonic development, Goette emphasized the necessity of investigating purely ontological and physiological regularities as a basis for the understanding of morphological phenomena, thereby criticizing Ernst Haeckel’s gastraea theory and the “biogenetic law,” which said nothing about the causation involved in the events occurring during ontogenesis. Haeckel responded immediately with the polemic work Ziele und Wege der heutigen Entwicklungsgeschichte (Jena, 1875), in which he presented Goette as an opponent of Darwin’s theory. Yet Goette had always acknowledged the theory of descent, although he was critical of the explanation of species transformation by means of the theory of selection, especially because of Darwin’s (and Haeckel’s) acceptance of the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

Goette sought to explain developmental processes through a particular “law of form” which ruled the world of living creatures. This conception superimposed purely mechanical operations upon a teleological and vitalistic interpretation of life itself. He viewed cell division as a purely chemicophysical process. With Wilhelm His and August Rauber, Goette was one of the pioneers in research in developmental physiology, which soon became a separate field of study in the “developmental mechanics” of Wilhelm Roux. Goette’s own careful investigations on animal embryology remained purely descriptive. After 1875 they treated most invertebrate groups as well: sponges, coelenterates, worms, mollusks, and echinoderms.

Goette had a little-known dispute with August Weismann concerning the “duration of life” and the definition of death. Whereas Weismann accepted the concept of “natural death” only for multicell forms of life, Goette defended the position that death is the necessary concomitant of reproduction and that there is no absolute continuity of life.

Goette’s reticence in the polemics over Darwinism, the cell theory, and conceptions of heredity soon caused his own views on these questions to recede into the background. Hence there are no assessments of his scientific work except for the short obituary by Karl Grobben. On the other hand, in accounts of zoology in the last decades of the nineteenth century his name is almost always mentioned. Besides his zoological writings, Goette published Holbeins Totentanz und seine Vorbilder, which shows his thorough knowledge of the history of art and culture.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Goette’s writings include Die Entwicklungsgeschichte der Unke (Bombinator igneus) als Grundlage einer vergleichenden Morphologie der Wirbelthiere (Leipzig, 1875); Über Entwicklung und Regeneration des Gliedmassenskeletts der Molche (Leipzig, 1879); Abhandlungen zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der Tiere, 5 vols. (Leipzig, 1882-1890); Über den Ursprung des Todes (Leipzig, 1883); Über Vererbung und Anpassung (Strasbourg, 1898); Lehrbuch der Zoologie (Leipzig, 1902); and Die Entwicklungsgeschichte der Tiere (Berlin-Leipzig, 1921). A nonscientific work is Holbeins Totentanz und seine Vorbilder (Strasbourg, 1897).

II. Secondary Literature. See Karl Grobben, in Almanach der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien, 72 (1923), 171-173; Jürgen-Wilhelm Harms, in R. Dittler, et al., eds., Handwörterbuch der Naturwissenschaften, V (Jena, 1934), 297; and Georg Uschmann, in Neue deutsche Biographie, VI (1964), 579.

Hans Querner