82 THE HISTORY OF CREATION. 
the fame of his other valuable works. It is quite different 
in the organic sciences, in which we are but rarely able to 
proceed, from the beginning, upon a firm mathematical 
basis; we are rather compelled, by the infinitely difficult 
and intricate nature of the problem, at the first to form 
inductions—that is, we are obliged to endeavour to establish 
general laws by numerous individual observations, which 
are not quite complete. A comparison of kindred series of 
phenomena, or the method of combination, is here the most 
important instrument for inquiry, and this method was 
applied by Goethe with as much success as with conscious 
knowledge of its value, in his works relating to the 
philosophy of nature. 
The most celebrated among Goethe's writings relating to 
organic nature is his Metamorphosis of Plants, which ap- 
peared in 1790, a work which distinctly shows a grasp of the 
fundamental idea of the theory of development, inasmuch 
as Goethe, in it, was labouring to point out a single organ, 
by the infinitely varied development and metamorphosis of 
which the;whole of the endless variety of forms in the world 
of plants might be conceived to have arisen; this funda- 
mental organ he found inthe leaf. If at that time the mi- 
croscope had been generally employed, if Goethe had 
examined the structure of organisms by the means of the 
microscope, he would have gone still further, and would 
have seen that the leaf is itself a compound of individual 
parts of a lower order, that is, of cells. He would then not 
have declared that the leaf, but that the cell is the real fun- 
damental organ by the multiplication, transformation, and 
combination (synthesis) of which, in the first place, the leaf 
is formed; and that, in the next place, by transformation, 
