32 ON GOETHE'S SCIENTIFIC RESEARCHES. 



with one for each of Cuvier's great divisions. The industry of 

 Goethe's successors has accumulated a well-sifted stock of facts, 

 infinitely more copious than what he could command, and has 

 followed up successfully into the minutest details what he could 

 only indicate in a general way. 



The second leading conception which science owes to Goethe 

 enunciated the existence of an analogy between the different 

 parts of one and the same organic being, similar to that which 

 we have just pointed out as subsisting between corresponding 

 parts of different species. In most organisms we see a great 

 repetition of single parts. This is most striking in the veget- 

 able kingdom ; each plant has a great number of similar stem 

 leaves, similar petals, similar stamens, and so on. According 

 to Goethe's own account, the idea first occurred to him while look- 

 ing at a fan-palm at Padua. He was struck by the immense 

 variety of changes of form which the successively developed 

 stem-leaves exhibit, by the way in which the first simple root 

 leaflets are replaced by a series of more and more divided leaves, 

 till we come to the most complicated. 



He afterwards succeeded in discovering the transformation 

 of stem-leaves into sepals and petals, and of sepals and petals 

 into stamens, nectaries, and ovaries, and thus he was led to the 

 doctrine of the metamorphosis of plants, which he published in 

 1790. Just as the anterior extremity of vertebrate animals 

 takes different forms, becoming in man and in apes an arm, in 

 other animals a paw with claws, or a forefoot with a hoof, or a 

 fin, or a wing, but always retains the same divisions, the same 

 position, and the same connection with the trunk, so the leaf 

 appears as a cotyledon, stem-leaf, sepal, petal, stamen, nectary, 

 ovary, etc., all resembling each other to a certain extent in origin 

 and composition, and even capable, under certain unusual con- 

 ditions, of passing from one form into the other, as, for example, 

 may be seen by any one who looks carefully at a full-blown rose, 

 where some of the stamens are completely, some of them partially, 

 changed into petals. This view of Goethe's, like the other, is 

 now completely adopted into science, and enjoys the universal 

 assent of botanists, though of course some details are still 



