ON Goethe's scientific rese.\rches. 39 



doctrine of the metamorphosis of plants was introduced 

 into botany as his distinct and recognised property ; but 

 his views on osteology were at first disputed by ana- 

 tomists, and only subsequently attracted attention when 

 the science had, apparently on independent grounds, 

 found its way to the same discovery. He himself com- 

 plains that his first ideas of a common type had en- 

 countered nothing but contradiction and scepticism at 

 the time when he was working them out in his own mind, 

 and that even men of the freshest and most original 

 intellect, like the two Von Humboldts, had listened to 

 them with something like impatience. But it is almost 

 a matter of course that in any natural or physical science, 

 theoretical ideas attract the attention of its cultivators 

 only when they are advanced in connection with the 

 whole of the evidence on which they rest, and thus justify 

 their title to recognition. Be that as it may, Groethe is 

 entitled to the credit of having caught the first glimpse 

 of the guiding ideas to which the sciences of botany and 

 anatomy were tending, and by which their present form 

 is determined. 



But great as is the respect which Groethe has secured 

 by his achievements in the descriptive natural sciences, 

 the denunciation heaped by all physicists on his re- 

 searches in their department, and especially on his 

 ' theory of colour,' is at least as uncompromising. This 

 is not the place to plunge into the controversy that 

 raged on the subject, and so I shall only attempt to state 

 clearly the points at issue, and to explain what prin- 

 ciple was involved, and what is the latent significance 

 of the dispute. 



To this end it is of some importance to go back to the 

 history of the origin of the theory, and to its simplest 

 form, because at that stage of the controversy the 

 points at issue are obvious, and admit of easy and dis- 



