GOETHE. 109 



calyx. Thus the most varied structures of plants 

 are rendered possible, and he who in his observations 

 keeps these laws always before his eyes will derive from 

 them great alleviation and advantage." These fev/ lines 

 contain the pith of the doctrine of the Metamorphosis 

 of Plants which so greatly agitated his contemporaries 

 during the first quarter of this century. The many- 

 sidedness of the idea made it inevitable that the 

 notion, once grasped, should extend to the remainder 

 of the organic world. Before Goethe, no naturalist had 

 regarded insects otherwise than as a given sum of indi- 

 vidual forms, distinguishable by certain definite charac- 

 teristics. Their internal structure had certainly been 

 disclosed by some few great men, such as Malpighi, 

 Swammerdam and Lyonet, but a real comparison of 

 species and genera had never been contemplated ; still 

 less an explanation of the body by its parts. This 

 Goethe accomplished, and with true genius ; for to his 

 theory, and with perfect truth, the rings which in the 

 insect are ranged from the head to the tail, presented 

 themselves, like the vegetal organs, as mere modifications 

 of one and the same rudimentary organ. There, the 

 leaf in the abstract, the primordial leaf or plant — here 

 ^he ring. 



With this — it was in 1796, in the discourses on the pro- 

 ject of a general introduction to Comparative Anatomy — • 

 he enunciated a truth which was not recognized till more 

 than forty years later, by one of the most distinguished 

 zoologists, Milne Edwards, and applied to the knowledge 

 of the animal world. This is the idea of the develop- 

 ment of organic beings by the heterogeneous evolution 

 of their fundamentally similar parts. Of this the cater- 



