156 Morphology tinder the Doctrine of [Book i. 



he saw nothing ultimately in the plant but leaves and stem, 

 including the root in the stem l . 



Long before Goethe's time speculation had busied itself with 

 attempts to explain these observations ; we saw how Cesalpino 

 and Linnaeus, starting from the old view that the pith is the 

 seat of the soul in plants, regarded the seeds as metamorphosed 

 pith, the floral envelopes with the stamens and the true leaves 

 as metamorphosed layers of the rind and wood of the stem. 

 The word metamorphosis from their point of view had a very 

 plain meaning ; it was really the cylindrical pith whose upper 

 end changed into seeds, it was the actual substance of the 

 cortex which produced both the ordinary leaves and the parts 

 of the flower. Wolff on the other hand from a point of view 

 of his own gave an apparently intelligible physical explanation 

 of the proposition, that all appendages of the stem are leaves, 

 but the explanation had the fault of not being true ; he 

 attributed the metamorphosis of leaves to altered nourishment, 

 the flowers especially to his ' vegetatio languescens.' 



Goethe's conception of the matter was from the first much 

 less clear, and chiefly because he was never able to bring the 

 abnormal into its true connection with the normal or ascending 

 metamorphosis. In the first sentence of his ' Doctrine of meta- 

 morphosis ' (1790) he says, 'that it is open to observation that 

 certain exterior parts of plants sometimes change and pass into 

 the form of adjacent parts, either wholly or in a greater or less 

 degree.' In the cases of which Goethe is here thinking a distinct 

 meaning can be affixed to the word metamorphosis ; if, for 

 example, the seeds of a plant with normal flowers produce a plant 

 which has petals in place of stamens, or in which the ovaries are 

 resolved into green expanded leaves, it is actually the case that 

 a plant of a known form has given rise to another plant of a 

 different form, in other words, a change or metamorphosis has 



1 See Wigand, ' Geschichte und Kritik der Metamorphose,' Leipzig, 1846, 

 p. 38. 



