Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her: powerless to separate ourselves from her, and powerless to penetrate beyond her. Without asking, or warning, she snatches us up into her circling dance, and whirls us on until we are tired, and drop from her arms. She is ever shaping new forms: what is, has never yet been; what has been, comes not again. Everything is new, and yet nought but the old …

So far Goethe.

When my friend, the Editor of Nature, asked me to write an opening article for his first number, there came into my mind this wonderful rhapsody on “Nature”, which has been a delight to me from my youth up. It seemed to me that no more fitting preface could be put before a Journal, which aims to mirror the progress of that fashioning by Nature of a picture of herself, in the mind of man, which we call the progress of Science.

[In a letter to Chancellor von Müller] Goethe says, that about the date of this composition of “Nature” he was chiefly occupied with comparative anatomy; and in 1786, gave himself incredible trouble to get other people to take an interest in his discovery, that man has a intermaxillary bone. After that he went on to the metamorphosis of plants; and to the theory of the skull; and, at length, had the pleasure of his work being taken up by German naturalists. The letter ends thus :—“If we consider the high achievements by which all the phenomena of Nature have been gradually linked together in the human mind … we shall, not without a smile … rejoice in the progress of fifty years.”…

When another half-century has passed, curious readers of the back numbers of Nature will probably look on our best, “not without a smile;” and, it may be, that long after the theories of the philosophers whose achievements are recorded in these pages, are obsolete, the vision of the poet will remain as a truthful and efficient symbol of the wonder and the mystery of Nature.

T. H. Huxley

From Nature 1, 9–11 (1869)