nature is truly the "Goddess," the great Diana of the Ephesians,
the everlasting Beauty, the artist of genius, ceaselessly inventing and
creating, in floods of Life, in Action's storm--an infinite ocean, a
restless weaving, a glowing Life. Embracing within herself the highest and
the humblest, she is in all things, throughout all change and
transformation, the same, shadowing forth the most perfect in the
simplest, and in the highest only unfolding what she had already shown in
the lowliest. Therefore Goethe hated all divisions and rubrics, all the
contrasts and boundaries which learned analysis attempts to introduce into
nature. Passionately he seized on Herder's idea of evolution, and it was
towards establishing it that all his endeavours, botanical, zoological,
morphological and osteological, were directed. He discovered in the human
skull the premaxillary bone which occurs in the upper jaw of all mammals,
and this "keystone to man" gave him, as he himself said, "such joy that
all his bowels moved." He interpreted the skull as developed from three
modified vertebrae. He sketched a hypothesis of the primitive plant, and
the theory that all the organs of the plant are modifications and
developments of the leaf. He was a friend of Etienne Geoffroy St. Hilaire,
who defended "l'unite de composition organique" in the forms of nature,
and evolution by gradual stages, and he was the vehement opponent of
Cuvier, who attempted to pick the world to pieces according to strictly
defined architectural plans and rigid classes. And what the inner impulse
to all this was he has summed up in the motto to his "Morphology" from the
verse in Job:

Lo, he goeth by me, and I see him not;
He is transformed, but I perceive him not.

He further declares it in the introductory verse to his Osteology:

Joyfully some years ago,
Zealously my spirit sought
To explore it all, and know
How all nature lived and wrought:
And 'tis ever One in all,
Though in many ways made known;
Small in great, and great in small,
Each in manner of its own.
Ever shifting, yet fast holding;
Near and far, and far and near;
So, with moulding and remoulding,--
To my wonder I am here.

In all this there is absolutely nothing of the characteristic mood and
spirit of "exact" naturalism, with its mechanical and mathematical
categories. It matters little that Goethe, when he thought of evolutio