1 82 FROM LAMARCK TO ST. HILAIRE. 



says : " I have abandoned my master Loder for my 

 friend Schiller, and Linnaeus for Shakespeare." 

 Yet Goethe, in the midst of poetry, never lost his 

 passion for scientific studies. He seems to have 

 felt instinctively that what contemporary science 

 needed was not only observation, but generaliza- 

 tion. He showed his own power of scientific 

 generalization in his famous studies upon the meta- 

 morphoses of plants, and in his discovery (later 

 independently reached by Oken) of the vertebrate 

 theory of the skull, which, indeed, was only a part 

 of his contribution to Comparative Osteology and 

 Anatomy. 



His inspiration was undoubtedly drawn partly 

 from Buffon and largely from the school of German 

 natural philosophers. He also imbibed the Greek 

 influence, and in his general view of Nature, ex- 

 pressed in his Gott und Welt, we see the ideas of 

 God working in Nature and of the unity of the 

 development process. This he also brought out in 

 the dialogue between Thales and Anaxagoras in 

 the Walpurgisnacht. Here is unfolded the con- 

 ception of the uniformity of past and present pro- 

 cesses in Geology and Cosmogony. It is astonish- 

 ing that Goethe never came across the works of 

 Lamarck. He anticipated Lamarck as an evolution- 

 ist in his Metamorphoses of Plants, which was pub- 

 lished in 1790, and the Lamarckian principle is 

 one in which he would have undoubtedly felt the 

 deepest interest. His sympathies in France were 



