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mathematical Carlyle. " Equitable Nature herself, who carries 
her mathematics and architectonics not on the face of her, but 
deep in the hidden heart of her. Nature will be wholly against 
him if he constrain her not." 
The poet thought that Nature lay as an open book to the student. 
The English thinker looked upon her as one who kept her secrets 
and had to have levers and screws applied to extract them. 
Goethe used the a priori method — but it must not be supposed 
that he did not experiment and study. His investigations and 
deductions in Comparative Anatomy and Botany indicate this and his 
"Metamorphosis of Plants" shows how an imaginative intellect 
may place a man a hundred years ahead of his contemporaries. 
It may be noted that Goethe's discovery of the Premaxilla in 
man was not accepted for nearly 40 years by anatomists and he 
was naturally indignant at the determined adhesion to old ideas. 
He uses this remarkably brilliant metaphor. " The phrases men 
are accustomed to expect incessantly end by becoming convictions 
and ossify the organs of intelligence." (Vicq d' Azyr. made the 
discovery first, but it is almost certain Goethe knew nothing 
of this;. 
As to the researches on the metamorphosis of plants, Dr. Hooker, 
who studied the subject of priority carefully, thinks that there is 
nothing in the writings of Linnaeus or Wolff (who formulated the 
theory) " that detracts from the merits of Goethe's re-discovery." 
Goethe's other great speculation, the vertebrate theory of the 
skull is not now accepted for the most part by anatomists, but the 
great principal of "Unity of type," the most important basis of 
our modern views of Comparative Anatomy was clearly enunciated 
by him. 
In fact, his writings are full of magnificent forecasts of 
generalisations for which eminent zoologists have won subsequent 
credit. Listen to this : — 
" Here then we have a great poet, who by applying his imagina- 
ation to his somewhat limited number of facts made important 
scientific discoveries — as a scientist his method was wrong. He 
did not, like Darwin, accumulate a vast number of observations 
and then make his deductions — but his imagination ran ahead and 
the truth flashed almost suddenly upon him." 
In his case we may say that the standpoint of the poet is in 
many ways a good one from which to study Nature. 
The poetic standpoint must not be confused with the treatment 
of natural scenes and phenomena by the poets. In this respect 
— if they are real poets — and not the wishy washy, sentimental, 
fourth rate creatures who now by the hundreds are claimed as 
such, their descriptions are often extremely good. They have 
the important power of expressing their thoughts in beautiful and 
correct language, no small advantage. Tennyson on the 
Nightingale, for instance, is remarkably sound, as an observer and 
a poet 
