1 86 FROM LAMARCK TO ST. HILAIRE. 



by reason, and could have undertaken lines of 

 inquiry, nothing would have prevented him from 

 carrying out its proofs. 



He was superior to all his three contemporaries, 

 Lamarck, Treviranus, and St. Hilaire, in his realiza- 

 tion that certain problems were very far from solu- 

 tion ; in a work, written in 1 794-95, but not published 

 until long afterwards, he remarked that, " the ques- 

 tion for future naturalists will be to determine how, 

 for instance, cattle got their horns, and not for what 

 they are used." He thus, with Kant, felt the gap 

 in the lack of a natural explanation for the origin 

 of purposive structures. 



Goethe's theory of the factors, so far as formulated, 

 had the spirit of Buffon and Lamarck, and is beauti- 

 fully expressed in the passage Haeckel selects from 

 his Metamorphosis of Animals (1819) : 



" All members develop themselves according to eternal laws, 

 And the rarest form mysteriously preserves the primitive type. 

 Form, therefore, determines the animal's way of life, 

 And in turn the way of life powerfully reacts upon all form. 

 Thus the orderly growth of form is seen to hold 

 Whilst yielding to change from externally acting causes." 1 



In his Metamorphoses of Plants, published in 

 1790, we find Goethe's ideas clearly expressed. 

 He here derives all plants from a single original 

 form, and all the elaborate structures of the plant 

 from the leaf. He called his theory, ^ Bildung und 

 Umbildungl or ' Formation and Transformation.' 



1 This contains the Aristotelian ' matter and form ' notion, together with a 

 perception of the factors of Lamarck (4th line) and of Buffon (6th line). 



