FREDERIK HENDRIK JULIUS died quite suddenly and unexpectedly on November 30th 1970, just before midnight, aged 69 years. He was for many years a science teacher at the Waldorf School in The Hague, and was known to many friends in this country through his visits and lectures.

During the past three years, he had formed a strong connection with Emerson College (as also with the Seminars in Järna, Sweden, and Stuttgart), and during the first week of December he was to have travelled to Forest Row to give, for the first time, a course in chemistry in the new science room at the College. For the past three summers, he had come to take courses in botany, and his way of approaching the plant world – and indeed all the kingdoms of nature – made a very deep impression on the students. His classes were, quite literally, ‘eye openers’ – he helped his students to see anew, to become aware of the open secrets waiting to speak to us in every aspect of nature. In this work, he was a Goetheanist through and through.

We can be grateful for the fact that some of the fruits of his long and loving collaboration with nature have been gathered up into books, the last of which (on the animal kingdom) has just been published in German. (He also completed books on the plants, on chemistry, and on the Zodiac). It could be of special importance to try to make some of this work avail­able in English, since Frits Julius’ reception at Emerson College suggests that he carried an impulse which young people in the West are looking for with some urgency. Our separation from nature, the blunting and bombard­ment of our senses with ugly sounds, colours, forms, smells, the growing awareness of technological and industrial threats to the life of the earth – these are experienced with special intensity in the West. Frits Julius was able to show a way to discover nature again, a very practical way, child-like in the deepest sense, at once reverent, playful and imbued with wonder. He has passed into the spiritual world at a time when there is a growing sense of an approaching crisis in our relationship with nature. At his funeral in The Hague on December 3rd, several of his friends and colleagues spoke of their sense that he carried an impulse of special signi­ficance for the future.