GOETHE. 



109 



calyx. Thus the most varied structures of plants 

 are rendered possible, and he who in his observations 

 keeps these laws always before his eyes will derive from 

 them great alleviation and advantage." These few lines 

 contain the pith of the doctrine of the Metamorphosis 

 of Plants which so greatly agitated his contemporaries 

 during the .first quarter of this century. The many- 

 sidedness of the idea made it inevitable that the no- 

 tion, once grasped, should extend to the remainder of 

 the organic world. Before Goethe, no naturalist had 

 regarded insects otherwise than as a given sum of indi- 

 vidual forms, distinguishable by certain definite charac- 

 teristics. Their internal structure had certainly been dis- 

 closed by some few great men, such as Malpighi, Swam- 

 merdam and Lyonet, but a real comparison of species 

 and genera had never been contemplated; still less an 

 explanation of the body by its parts. This Goethe ac- 

 complished, and with true genius; for to his theory, 

 and with perfect truth, the rings which in the in- 

 sect are ranged from the head to the tail, presented 

 themselves, like the vegetal organs, as mere modifica- 

 tions of one and the same rudimentary organ. There, 

 the leaf in the abstract, the primordial leaf or plant — 

 here the ring. 



With this — it was in 1796, in the discourses on the 

 project of a general introduction to Comparative Anat- 

 omy — he enunciated a truth which was not recognized 

 till more than forty years later, by one of the most distin- 

 guished zoologists, Milne Edwards, and applied to the 

 knowledge of the animal world. This is the idea of the 

 development of organic beings by the heterogeneous 

 evolution of their fundamentally similar parts. . Of -this 



