GOETHE’S PROGRESSIVE METAMORPHOSIS 187 
follows upon it has been sufficiently recognised. The evidence that this 
tendency actually exists is to be found in the fact, illustrated in so many 
plants, that more numerous spores are habitually initiated than the plant 
is able to bring to maturity. The powers of nutrition impose the actual 
limit of the output of spores in any specific example, and any increase 
of the vegetative system will therefore result in an increased capacity for 
producing mature spores. Where the vegetative region extends so as to 
increase the powers of nutrition, it commonly happens that the initiation 
of potential spores still keeps in advance of such increased supply, and 
so the two seem to advance together. In the present. chapter various 
examples from among the Archegoniatae will be examined from this point 
of view: upon these some idea may be based of the general methods of 
progression of the sporophyte, from its less differentiated state towards 
that seen in the Flowering Plants, where the vegetative and reproductive 
regions are clearly distinct, though their construction still shows a funda- 
mental similarity of plan. But before this is entered upon, it will be 
well to clear the ground by consideration of the earlier theoretical views 
on the relation of these two regions of the plant-body. 
Kaspar Friedrich Wolff laid the foundation for a comparative view of 
the appendages of the Higher Plants. In his Zeoria Generationis, published 
in the latter half of the eighteenth century, he propounded the thesis 
that ‘‘in the whole plant, the parts of which differ so extraordinarily from 
‘one another at first sight, there is nothing to be found on mature con- 
sideration but leaves and stem, for the root belongs to the latter.” For 
him all the appendages were of foliar nature. The modifications which 
appear in .the parts which compose the flower arose, in his view, from 
the gradual waning of vegetative power, or “‘vegetatio languescens,” as he 
called it; their development constantly diminishes. the longer the vegetation 
is continued, and finally ceases altogether ; consequently the essence of all 
these modifications of the leaf lies in their incomplete development. 
It is but a slight step from ideas such as these to the doctrine of 
Metamorphosis as introduced by Goethe in 1790. He assumed an ideal 
fundamental organ, from which the different leaf-forms in any one of the 
higher plants could be regarded as derived. He designated as ‘‘ Meta- 
morphosis” that process by which one and the same organ presents itself 
to us in various modifications. This metamorphosis may. be of either 
of three kinds: regular, irregular, and occasional. Of these the regular 
or progressive metamorphosis, with which we are specially concerned, is 
that illustrated in any normal Flowering Plant by the progression from 
the cotyledons through the foliage leaves to the flower with its successive 
series of parts. But, as Sachs points out in his Astory of Botany (Engl. 
Ed., p. 156), Goethe sometimes used the word “Metamorphosis” in its 
literal sense, as meaning an actual change in the organs arising from a 
transmutation of the species; sometimes his meaning was an ideal one; 
for, regarding the way in which cotyledons, foliage leaves, bracts, sepals, 
