232 Dr Danbcny on ilo Writinps and 



theless distinctly maintains, that the bracts, the calyx, the 

 corolla, the stamens, and the pistil, are modified leaves. 



The defects of this theory Dr Lindley states to be, " in its 

 failing to account for the modifications which the pistil under- 

 goes, and in the fanciful supposition, that the organs of fruc- 

 tification are prepared six years beforehand, and that their 

 peculiar appearance is owing to the time of their development 

 being anticipated by some unknown but ever acting cause." 



The celebrated poet Goethe, in the year 1790, had the merit 

 of presenting this theory divested of the above accompani- 

 ments, and his " Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu 

 erklaren," is remarkable as an example of one of those happy 

 guesses at truth, which great minds occasionally arrive at, by 

 a rapid glance over nature, rather than by that patient inves- 

 tigation of particular phenomena, by which great general 

 principles require, for the most part, to be worked out. 



Coming, however, from an individual whose^ reputation was 

 built upon works of poetry and imagination, his theory ex- 

 cited little attention amongst naturalists, until it was found to 

 harmonize so remarkably v.'ith the principles, hinted at by 

 Brown, and propounded more fully by Decandolle, with re - 

 spect to the modifications which organs undergo from adhe- 

 sion, &c. ; and it at length came to be discovered, that the 

 " degeneration of organs" and their " metamorphosis," are 

 only different modes of regarding the same phenomenon,* and 

 that the poet and the philosopher, though setting out from 

 opposite directions, had in fact met at the same point. 



This doctrine was more fully explained in his work on the 

 Anatomy, or, as he proposed to call it, the Organography of 

 plants, which was not given to the world till 1827, although 

 its principal contents had been imparted to a numerous class 

 of pupils in the lectures he had delivered for several preced- 

 ing years. 



In this admirable work, which can only be estimated at its 

 full value by those who compare it with the treatises on bo- 

 tany published at the same time, as by Smith and Keith in 

 England, by Mirbel in France, or by Sprengel in Germany, 



* See some good reuiarks in Fiourens' Eloge on the distinction Letween 

 the views of DetnuuolK' and Goethe on this subject. 



