130 CHAPTERS ON EVOLUTION. 



No better starting-point can well be found than within the region 

 of flowers and fruits, whereof many familiar objects may be shown 

 to teem with the lessons of highest philosophy. Once again, 

 Goethe's name comes to the front as the chief originator and 

 expounder of those likenesses between very diverse organs, the 

 true import of which relationship the great poet- philosopher himself 

 did not fully comprehend. In his work "Versuch die Metamor- 

 phosen der Pflanzen zu erklaren," bearing date 1790, Goethe, 

 following hard upon Caspar Friedrich Wolff, enunciated his thoughts 

 concerning the " Metamorphoses " of plants. It is necessary.first of 

 all to clearly understand the significance of this phrase " metamor- 

 phosis," and its applications to the study of likenesses. With Goethe, 

 the phrase implied what we now term " abnormal development" It 

 meant the chronicle of the changes which might take place in the 

 usual plan or type in which a plant was built up. The production of a 

 " double flower " was to Goethe, as it is to us to-day, an example of 

 metamorphosis of the alteration of parts from their normal type. 

 What may be said, however, to be the bearing of these discoveries 

 on the elucidations of the problems of animal and plant forms and 

 existence ? The reply is clear to us to-day, although to the believer 

 in " freaks of Nature " the question would have been impossible of 

 solution. To the latter, a monstrous development, or a departure 

 from the ordinary type of things, was an evidence that Nature was 

 given occasionally to play strange pranks without reason or meaning. 

 The very phrase " sports " of Nature, applied to the monstrosities or 

 abnormalities thus produced, indicates with sufficient clearness the 

 opinion respecting the frivolity of Madre Natura which the old 

 naturalists entertained. A double flower and a "Two-Headed 

 Nightingale " were equally good illustrations of the " freaks " in 

 which Nature was wont to indulge. The idea that possibly the 

 production of a monstrosity in animals and plants was as directly 

 due to the operation of law as the birth of natural progeny was 

 never entertained, until the genius of Goethe and his successors 

 Dointed out that in the so-called abnormalities of life we might find 

 a clue to the primitive forms of living things. In the production of 

 her " freaks " Nature was " showing her hand," so to speak, and 

 lifting a corner of the veil in which her ways of development were 

 so thickly enshrouded. The transformations and metamorphoses 

 of animals and plants, viewed in this light, are but the occasional 

 return of Nature to primitive ways and methods of working. On 

 the idea that living things have not always existed as they now 

 appear, we behold in deviations from the normal type a clue to 

 the stages and states of long ago. On the theory that creation 

 has been from the first a stable and unaltering collection of living 

 forms, the metamorphoses and variations of animals and plants 



