Early in 1790 Goethe was summoned to Venice to meet the Duchess Dowager, who, having travelled for some time in Italy, was now about to return to Weimar. Her coming was long delayed, and, being restless and impatient, he occupied himself in writing a series of rather bitter epigrams. After six weeks’ absence he was delighted to find himself again in Weimar, for now his home was doubly dear to him, a son having been born on Christmas Day of the previous year. The child was baptized by Herder, and received the name Julius August Walther. Afterwards three children were born dead, and a fourth died in infancy. On each of these occasions Goethe suffered poignant grief, and wholly lost his self-control. His second visit to Venice was made memorable by an important scientific discovery. He was standing with his valet Seidel in the Jews’ cemetery, when Seidel lifted a piece of a sheep’s skull, and handed it to Goethe, pretending that it was the skull of a Jew. As Goethe looked at it, it suddenly occurred to him that the bones of which the skull is composed are not essentially different from vertebræ, but are, in fact, vertebræ transformed. The idea corresponds exactly with his conception of the foliar organs of flowering plants as transformed leaves. Goethe did not mean that in the course of long ages vertebræ had been developed into the bones of the skull, but simply that Nature, in creating these bones, modifies vertebræ to suit special needs. Like his earlier discoveries, however, this theory--which is only another application of his general doctrine of types--becomes thoroughly intelligible only when the facts to which it relates are explained by the law of evolution. It is the supreme merit of Goethe’s contributions to biology that they all pointed in the direction of evolution, and were among the influences that made the recognition of it, sooner or later, inevitable.