in climbing and creeping plants. Next we have to observe the spiral direction which winds round the other.' This spiral direction which passes at once with Goethe into a 'spiral tendency,' is seen in various phenomena of vegetation, as in spiral vessels, in twining stems, and sometimes in the position of leaves. The closing remarks of this short essay, in which he explains the vertical tendency as the male, the spiral as the female principle in the plant, show how far Goethe lost himself in the profundities of the nature-philosophy. Thus he introduced his readers into the deepest depths of mysticism.
It would be as useless as it would be wearisome to follow out in detail to its extremest point of absurdity the progressive transformation which the doctrine of metamorphosis underwent in the hands of the botanists of the nature-philosophy school, and to see how its catchwords, polarity, contraction and expansion, the stem-like and the fistular, anaphytosis and life-nodes, and others, were compounded with the results of the most every-day observation into meaningless conglomerates; rough obscure impressions of the sense, as well as incidental fancies, were regarded as ideas and principles. A full account of these inconceivable aberrations is to be found in Wigand's 'Geschichte und Kritik der Metamorphose.' Our own countrymen certainly, Voigt, Kieser, Nees von Esenbeck, C. H. Schulz, and Ernst Meyer (the historian of botany) bear off the palm of absurdity, but there were others also, among them the Swedish botanist Agardh, and many Frenchmen, Turpin, for instance, and Du Petit-Thouars[1], who were not altogether free from this weak-
- ↑ Robert du Petit-Thouars was born in Anjou in 1758 and collected plants during many years in the Mauritius, Madagascar, and Bourbon. He was afterwards Director of the Botanic Garden at Roule, and became Member of the Academy in 1820. He died in 1831. His articles in the 'Biographie Universelle' prove him to have been a writer of ability. Preconceived opinions interfered with the success of his own investigations, especially into the increase in thickness of woody stems, and obstinate
