GOETHE. Igl 



viction, maintaining and repeating his arguments to 

 his death-bed. There is a pathetic strain in the in- 

 troduction to the last edition of his Animaux sans 

 Vertedres : — 



"Avant d'atteindre le terme de mon existence, j'ai pensd que 

 dans un nouvel ouvrage, susceptible d'etre considt^r^ comme 

 une seconde Edition de mon Systhne des Animaux sans Vertcbres^ 

 je devais exposer les principaux faits que j'ai recuellis pour mes 

 legons. . . . Ainsi que mes observations et mes reflexions sur la 

 source de ces faits." 



JoHANN Wolfgang Goethe (i 749-1832) was 

 the greatest poet of Evolution ; he saw the law 

 as a poet, as a philosopher, and as an anatomist. 



While making the most substantial contribu- 

 tions to the scientific evidences, he did not, Hke 

 his French contemporary, formulate a system. He 

 was born five years later and died three years 

 earlier than Lamarck, yet never knew of his writ- 

 ings. This circumstance Haeckel truly calls a 

 tragic loss to science, for Goethe would have made 

 the buried Philosophie Zoologiqiie known to the 

 w^orld. 



The brilliant early achievements of Goethe in 

 science afford another illustration of the union of 

 imagination and powers of observation as the essen- 

 tial characteristics of the naturalist. When he took 

 his journey into Italy, and the poetic instinct began 

 to predominate over the scientific, science lost a 

 disciple who w^ould have ranked among the very 

 hio-hest, if not the hiorhest. Of this time Goethe 



