For 200 years Goethe has remained the giant of German literature, analogous to England's William Shakespeare . Unlike Shakespeare, however, Goethe's skills were not confined just to literature - they extended to the arts and sciences. He studied the natural sciences, including botany - he wrote several works on plant morphology - and meteorology, popularising the Goethe barometer in Germany. In 1784 he discovered the vestiges of the intermaxillary bone in the upper jaw of humans, and in 1810 he published a treatise on The Theory of Colours . Such is the stature of the man that between April and September 2006 a sculpted stack of books entitled The Walk of Ideas stood in a square near the Unter den Linden boulevard in Berlin. Goethe's name was on the spine of the book at the base of the stack, symbolically underpinning German literature.