PHANEROGAMIA: FLOWERS. 313 



became the tilting-ground for what were in part most adventurous 

 fantasies and fictions. The unfortunate seed which Goethe sowed, 

 sprang up with sad rapidity ; and next to Schellingism, we owe it to 

 him * that, in Botany, whims of the imagination have taken the place of 

 earnest and acute scientific investigation. In that unbounded region 

 every individual's imagination had naturally equal right ; there was a 

 total want of any scientific principle which should undertake the deci- 

 sion between differing opinions of any method, the recognised accuracy 

 of which could give security for the results of an investigation. 



I have striven, in my methodological introduction, to develope such a 

 principle for Botany, out of the contemplation of its object ; and I here 

 once more express my firm conviction, that without rigid carrying 

 through of the investigation of development, in the total as in the sin- 

 gular, Botany is, and will remain, an unscientific game of purely arbi- 

 trary arrangement and combination of uncomprehended forms. In spite 

 of our 'by far less difficult problem, Zoology has far outstripped us, and 

 has shown us the road which properly she should have learned from us. 

 "We must follow behind, if every botanist does not in time become red 

 with shame, who takes in hand a work of Miiller, Schwann, Reichert, 

 Baer, Rathke, Siebold, Wagner, and all the hundred others, by the side 

 of whom we can scarce place half a dozen. 



Following Robert Brown, I first sought to apply the investigation of 

 development to the discovery of the structure of flowers. In this man- 

 ner I found the explanation of the flower of the Grasses, the Carices, the 

 composition of the involucre in Euphorbia, &. c. With my deceased friend 

 Vogel, I published the first perfect history of development of the flower 

 of a Leguminosa. After a considerable time some botanists followed 



* Perhaps a part of the blame rests upon an innocent encouragement, expressed in a 

 friendly manner, in a letter of A. von Humboldt, who certainly did not mean what 

 Goethe understood him to do, at a time when, from his total want of mathematical ex- 

 perience and knowledge, he made such a poor figure in science with his theory of colour. 

 Goethe said (Contribution to Morphology, Stuttgard and Tubingen, 1817, p. 122.) : 

 " Humboldt sends me his work with a flattering picture, by which he indicates that poetry 

 may indeed attain to lifting the veil of Nature ; and if he admits it, who will deny it ? " 

 Humboldt certainly meant no more by this than that a poet, who by his inmost nature is 

 led to it, may, in particular cases, conceive the universal (that is, the universal human), 

 and even may succeed, by the contemplation of Nature alone, in finding a happy 

 thought, without that thought itself being already science, and without admitting the 

 possibility of its becoming an integrant part of it until further carried out and inves- 

 tigated. The mistaken meaning which Goethe attributed to the words, that a poetic 

 treatment of nature could be placed on a level, or even preferred, to the rigidly scien- 

 tific, could not have existed in Humboldt's mind. But it happened just at a time 

 when the misty fanaticism of Schelling's " Philosophy of Nature," built on the same 

 want of psychological investigation, stirred up together imagination and intellect, musings 

 and thought, poetry and science, into a mixture as distasteful to the true poet as to the 

 clear thinker. This has brought much trouble upon us in science, and, especially in 

 Botany, caused a gnawing disease of development. Zoology soon recovered from this 

 fever, since it had at that time already developed abundance of healthy juices ; but 

 Botany, which then was staggering about as the melancholy Linnaan skeleton, had 

 longer to suffer ; since, judging from the preceding condition, the ruddy hue of fever 

 was taken for a sign of health. Poetry and science are two regions distinct in their 

 inmost essence, which both lose their whole value when they are intermingled. A 

 poetical treatment of science, and especially of philosophy, the most strict of all sciences, 

 is as repugnant and distasteful to the clearly educated mind, as if one should strike a 

 bargain, order a coat, or call a servant in a poetical speech. A learned poem is empty 

 versified prose a remnant of the barbarism of the middle ages poetical science 

 is a troubled mysticism of a cloudy fanatic, of whom, indeed, in the imperfect educa- 

 tion of our thinking powers in youth, there will long exist instances. 



