160 Morphology tinder the Doctrine of [Book i. 



in climbing and creeping plants. Next we have to observe the 

 spiral direction which winds round the other.' This spiral 

 direction which passes at once with Goethe into a 'spiral 

 tendency,' is seen in various phenomena of vegetation, as in 

 spiral vessels, in twining stems, and sometimes in the position 

 of leaves. The closing remarks of this short essay, in which 

 he explains the vertical tendency as the male, the spiral as the 

 female principle in the plant, show how far Goethe lost himself 

 in the profundities of the nature-philosophy. Thus he intro- 

 duced his readers into the deepest depths of mysticism. 



It would be as useless as it would be wearisome to follow 

 out in detail to its extremest point of absurdity the pro- 

 gressive transformation which the doctrine of metamorphosis 

 underwent in the hands of the botanists of the nature-philo- 

 sophy school, and to see how its catchwords, polarity, con- 

 traction and expansion, the stem-like and the fistular, 

 anaphytosis and life-nodes, and others, were compounded 

 with the results of the most every-day observation into mean- 

 ingless conglomerates ; rough obscure impressions of the 

 sense, as well as incidental fancies, were regarded as ideas 

 and principles. A full account of these inconceivable aberra- 

 tions is to be found in Wigand's ' Geschichte und Kritik 

 der Metamorphose.' Our own countrymen certainly, Voigt, 

 Kieser, Nees von Esenbeck, C. H. Schulz, and Ernst Meyer 

 (the historian of botany) bear off the palm of absurdity, but 

 there were others also, among them the Swedish botanist 

 Agardh, and some Frenchmen, Turpin, for instance, and Du 

 Petit-Thouars x , who were not altogether free from this weak- 



1 Louis Marie Aubert du Petit-Thouars was born in Anjou in 1758 and 

 collected plants during many years in the Mauritius, Madagascar, and 

 Bourbon. He was afterwards Director of the Botanic Garden at Roule, 

 and became Member of the Academy in 1820. Hediedin 1831. Hisarticles 

 in the ' Biographie Universale' prove him to have been a writer of ability. 

 Preconceived opinions interfered with the success of his own investiga- 

 tions, especially into the increase in thickness of woody stems, and obstinate 



