GOETHE'S PROGRESSIVE METAMORPHOSIS 157 



follows upon it has been sufficiently recognised. The evidence that this 

 tendency actually exists is to be found in the fact, illustrated in so many 

 plants, that more numerous spores are habitually initiated than the plant 

 is able to bring to maturity. The powers of nutrition impose the actual 

 limit of the output of spores in any specific example, and any increase 

 of the vegetative system will therefore result 'in an increased capacity for 

 producing mature spores. Where the vegetative region extends so as to 

 increase the powers of nutrition, it commonly happens that the initiation 

 of potential spores still keeps in advance of such increased supply, and 

 so the two seem to advance together. In the present chapter various 

 examples from among the Archegoniatae will be examined from this point 

 of view : upon these some idea may be based of the general methods of 

 progression of the sporophyte, from its less differentiated state towards 

 that seen in the Flowering Plants, where the vegetative and reproductive 

 regions are clearly distinct, though their construction still shows a funda- 

 mental similarity of plan. But before this is entered upon, it will be 

 well to clear the ground by consideration of the earlier theoretical views 

 on the relation of these two regions of the plant-body. 



Kaspar Friedrich Wolff laid the foundation for a comparative view of 

 the appendages of the Higher Plants. In his Teona Generationis, published 

 in the latter half of the eighteenth century, he propounded the thesis 

 that "in the whole plant, the parts of which differ so extraordinarily from 

 one another at first sight, there is nothing to be found on mature con- 

 sideration but leaves and stem, for the root belongs to the latter." For 

 him all the appendages were of foliar nature. The modifications which 

 appear in the parts which compose the flower arose, in his view, from 

 the gradual waning of vegetative power, or " vegetatio languescens" as he 

 called it ; their development constantly diminishes the longer the vegetation 

 is continued, and finally ceases altogether ; consequently the essence of all 

 these modifications of the leaf lies in their incomplete development. 



It is but a slight step from ideas such as these to the doctrine of 

 Metamorphosis as introduced by Goethe in 1790. He assumed an ideal 

 fundamental organ, from which the different leaf-forms in any one of the 

 higher plants could be regarded as derived. He designated as " Meta- 

 morphosis " that process by which one and the same organ presents itself 

 to us in various modifications. This metamorphosis may be of either 

 of three kinds : regular, irregular, and occasional. Of these the regular 

 or progressive metamorphosis, with which we are specially concerned, is 

 that illustrated in any normal Flowering Plant by the progression from 

 the cotyledons through the foliage leaves to the flower with its successive 

 series of parts. But, as Sachs points out in his History of Botany (Engl. 

 Ed., p. 156), Goethe sometimes used the word "Metamorphosis" in its 

 literal sense, as meaning an actual change in the organs arising from a 

 transmutation of the species ; sometimes his meaning was an ideal one : 

 for, regarding the way in which cotyledons, foliage leaves, bracts, sepals, 



