GOETHE, 119 
earnestness and persevering zeal, and is not totally 
deficient in intuitive tact, cultivated by exercise, far 
from being perplexed by them, will assuredly, amidst 
all their varieties of form, very soon detect the true 
species and their characters. But if indeed, in any one 
genus rich in forms, no limit to which nature herself 
adheres should be discovered, what should hinder us 
from treating it as a single species, and all its forms 
as so many varieties? As long as the evidence is 
wanting, which it is not likely will ever be produced, 
that no species whatever exists in nature, but that every, 
even the remotest form, may be evolved from the other 
by intermediate links,—till then we must be allowed to 
rely upon the course already indicated. Let the master 
now instruct the scholar, or, according to ancient custom, 
support him.” And he does support him, for in his 
morphological writings he adopts his pupil’s enuncia- 
tions on the problem as a testimony of entire commu- 
nity of mind and soul. 
There can be no question that Goethe’s thoughts on 
organic nature were more profound than those of his 
contemporaries. But we must not forget that the cardi- 
nal idea of a modifiable archetype prevailed among 
eminent men both before and with Goethe, as I have 
shown in my little work known to the profession, “The 
Development of Comparative Anatomy” (Die Entwick- 
elung der vergleichenden Anatomie, 1855). If in his 
popular lectures, Peter Camper amused his audience by 
a diagram in which he evolved a beautiful female figure 
from a horse ; if he says that he is so entirely absorbed 
in studying the whale and comparing it with the human 
structure that every girl, pretty or ugly, appeared to him 
