CHAPTER I. 

 TRACES OF UNITY IN PLANTS. 



GOETHE was not the first to take the Ovidian view of 

 the vegetable world which found expression in his well- 

 known treatise on " Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen," or 

 even to make use of this title, but he was assuredly the 

 first to write so as to compel others to pay attention to 

 the subject. Indeed, in this very treatise, so far from 

 pretending to be the first, he refers, without naming 

 them, to others who have written with the same object 

 under the same title, and, elsewhere, he tells more parti- 

 cularly how the honour of priority must be conceded to 

 Caspar-Frederick Wolf, the author of the well-known 

 " Theoria Generationis," a Prussian by birth, who spent 

 the last thirty years of his life at St. Petersburg, and 

 who, several years before his death in 1794, in a paper 

 entitled " Du Developpement des Plantes," and printed 

 in the Memoirs of the Academy of the Russian capital, 

 pointed out, incidentally but not indistinctly, that the 

 leaves, the calyx, the corolla, the pericarp, the seed, the 

 stem, and the root are all so related to each other as 

 to be mutually convertible. 



The parts of the plant which Goethe sets himself to 

 examine are, not the root, nor yet the stem and its 

 branches, but the cotyledons, the plumule, the ordinary 

 leaves, the floral leaves, the calyx, the corolla, the 

 nectary, the stamens, the pistils, the coverings of the 



