Lorenz Oken’s Allgemeine Naturgeschichte: The Great German Encyclopedia of Natural History
In the autumn of 1833, the first volumes of a new encyclopaedia began to appear in the bookshops of Stuttgart and Leipzig: Allgemeine Naturgeschichte für alle Stände — General Natural History for All Classes — a work of extraordinary ambition that proposed to bring together the entire knowledge of the natural world — zoology, botany, mineralogy, geology, and natural philosophy — in a form accessible to the educated general reader. Its author was Lorenz Oken (1779–1851), one of the most remarkable and controversial figures in the history of German science: a naturalist, philosopher, and polemicist whose career had taken him from the heights of academic distinction to political exile and back, and whose vision of the natural world — shaped by the Romantic philosophy of Naturphilosophie — was as ambitious as the encyclopaedia he was now producing.
Lorenz Oken and Naturphilosophie
Lorenz Oken was born in Bohlsbach in Baden in 1779 and studied medicine and natural history at the universities of Freiburg, Würzburg, and Göttingen before establishing himself as a professor of natural history at Jena in 1807. It was at Jena — the intellectual centre of German Romanticism, the university of Schiller and Hegel and the brothers Schlegel — that Oken developed the philosophical framework that would shape his entire scientific career: Naturphilosophie, the Romantic philosophy of nature associated above all with Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, which held that nature was not a collection of separate objects to be classified and catalogued but a dynamic, unified whole — a single organism animated by a single principle, in which every part reflected and expressed the whole.
For Oken, Naturphilosophie was not merely a philosophical position but a scientific programme. He believed that the natural world was organized according to a small number of fundamental principles — principles that could be discovered by the philosopher-naturalist who approached nature with the right combination of empirical observation and speculative insight. His most celebrated — and most controversial — contribution to natural history was his vertebral theory of the skull: the idea, developed independently by Oken and by Goethe, that the bones of the vertebrate skull were modified vertebrae, and that the entire vertebrate skeleton was built on a single repeating plan. The theory was eventually confirmed by comparative anatomy, and it became one of the foundations of the morphological tradition in 19th-century biology.
Oken's career was not without its difficulties. His founding of the journal Isis in 1817 — a wide-ranging periodical of natural history, philosophy, and politics that became one of the most influential scientific journals in Germany — brought him into conflict with the Weimar government, and he was eventually forced to resign his professorship at Jena in 1819. He subsequently taught at Munich and Zürich, where he founded the University of Zürich in 1833 — the same year that the first volumes of the Allgemeine Naturgeschichte began to appear.
The Allgemeine Naturgeschichte: An Encyclopaedia for All Classes
The Allgemeine Naturgeschichte für alle Stände was published in Stuttgart by Hoffmann between 1833 and 1841, in thirteen volumes of text accompanied by a separate atlas of lithographic plates. The title — General Natural History for All Classes — announced Oken's democratic ambition: this was not a work for specialists but for the educated general reader, a comprehensive survey of the natural world written in a style that combined scientific rigour with philosophical depth and literary accessibility. The encyclopaedia covered the full range of the natural sciences: mineralogy and geology, botany, and zoology — the last occupying the majority of the volumes and the plates, and including the oology section, Nester u. Eier (Nests and Eggs), whose plates Taf. 7 and Taf. 8 are among the most visually remarkable in the entire work.
The lithographic plates of the Allgemeine Naturgeschichte were produced by the Stuttgart lithographic workshops at the height of the technique's development in Germany. Lithography — the printing of images from a flat stone surface, invented by Alois Senefelder in Munich in 1796 — had, by the 1830s, become the dominant medium for scientific illustration in Germany, replacing the copper engraving that had served natural history publishing since the 17th century. Its advantages for the illustration of natural history were considerable: it could reproduce the fine gradations of tone required to convey the three-dimensional form of a shell or an egg with a fidelity that engraving could not match, and it was faster and cheaper to produce, making it ideal for the large-scale encyclopaedic publishing projects of the 1830s and 1840s.
The Oology Plates: Nester und Eier
The oology section of the Allgemeine Naturgeschichte — Nester u. Eier, Nests and Eggs — is one of the most visually extraordinary sections of the entire work. Oken's ambition in the oology plates was encyclopaedic in the fullest sense: to document the full diversity of avian egg morphology across families, from the great raptors — eagles, falcons, hawks — to the waterbirds and the small terrestrial songbirds, presenting in a single visual survey the extraordinary range of size, colour, pattern, and form that the avian egg encompasses.
Taf. 8 — the plate that appears on the front cover of the journal — is the more visually dramatic of the two: a free-form arrangement of eggs of different sizes and species, shaded with exceptional lithographic precision to convey the three-dimensional form of each specimen, the extraordinary calligraphic scrawl patterns of egg No. 19 and No. 3 — characteristic of buntings and seabirds, whose eggs bear the distinctive hair-streak markings that have fascinated oologists since the 18th century — rendered with a mastery that makes them among the most visually arresting specimens on the plate. The numbered specimens correspond to a species index in the encyclopaedia text, allowing the reader to compare the relative size of eggs from the eagle to the smallest songbird in a single visual field.
Taf. 7 — the back cover plate — takes a different compositional approach: a more ordered, linear arrangement of eggs in rows, creating a rhythmic visual pattern that emphasizes the systematic, encyclopaedic character of Oken's project. The dramatic contrast between the large smooth cream and white eggs of Nos. 1 and 2 — the eggs of large raptors — and the densely mottled, colourful eggs surrounding them is one of the most effective visual arguments in the history of oological illustration: a demonstration, in a single plate, of the extraordinary diversity of form and pattern that natural selection has produced in the avian egg.
The Legacy of Oken's Natural History
The Allgemeine Naturgeschichte für alle Stände was one of the last great works of the Naturphilosophie tradition in German science. By the time the final volumes appeared in 1841, the intellectual landscape of German natural history was already changing: the speculative, philosophical approach of Oken and his contemporaries was giving way to the more rigorous, empirical methods of the new generation of scientists — the physiologists, the cell biologists, the comparative anatomists — who would transform German science in the 1840s and 1850s and lay the foundations for the Darwinian revolution. Oken himself lived long enough to see the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859, though he died in Zürich in the same year, at the age of eighty.
His encyclopaedia, however, endured as a monument to the ambition and the visual richness of the Romantic natural history tradition — a work that combined the philosophical depth of Naturphilosophie with the empirical breadth of the encyclopaedic tradition and the visual beauty of the German lithographic art of the 1830s and 1840s. Its oology plates, in particular, remain among the finest scientific illustrations of the Romantic era: documents of a moment when the natural sciences and the visual arts were still, in the hands of the great encyclopaedists, the same conversation.
If Oken's vision of the natural world inspires you, our Bird Eggs Journal — Lorenz Oken Naturgeschichte 1833 brings his oology plates to the cover of a hardcover journal.
References
- Oken, L. Allgemeine Naturgeschichte für alle Stände. Stuttgart: Hoffmann, 1833–1841.
- Lenoir, T. The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanics in Nineteenth-Century German Biology. University of Chicago Press, 1982.
- Richards, R. J. The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe. University of Chicago Press, 2002.
- Jardine, N., Secord, J. A., & Spary, E. C. (eds.). Cultures of Natural History. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
- Birkhead, T. The Most Perfect Thing: Inside (and Outside) a Bird’s Egg. Bloomsbury, 2016.
