182 SOLACE OF DISCOVERY. 



was one earthly solace left — sweet and passing sweet to 

 him — discovery. With this phantom of the mind 

 alluring him on, he fought against the fates, disregard- 

 ed of the daily severance of life by the black-veiled 

 Atropos. He seemed to possess a strength of soul that 

 enabled him to stave off pathological changes — the 

 grand help to this fortitude being the " Triangle " 

 theory of formation and law that he hoped to complete 

 as the greatest of his earthly work. 



Readers of this sketch will be apt to treat Goodsir' s 

 triangle as Schiller behaved after listeniug to Goethe's 

 theory of the metamorphosis of plants, by a shake of 

 the head, and saying — " All this is mere idea, and not 

 founded on observation ;" to which Goethe replied, 

 as probably Goodsir would have done in defence of 

 his universal image, that " it was agreeable to have 

 ideas at his command, and particularly to see the 

 reality of them with his own eyes." The Goethian 

 doctrine, once so much laughed at, has long been 

 accepted by the world. Time will show if the same 

 fate will attend Goodsir's idea as to Man — a psychical 

 being and of " form divine " being but a crystal in his 

 structural entity and arrangement. 



The title he adopted for his lectures on man — 

 " On the Dignity of the Human Body" — is highly 

 characteristic of Goodsir. It augurs respect for the 

 physique of humanity, — it honours the form of man 

 as a type of excellence, — and seems to breathe of 

 reverential regard for the precedence and lordliness 

 enshrined therein. At the threshold of his argument 



