“The brilliant early achievements of Goethe in science afford another illustration of the union of imagination and powers of observation as the essential 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 would have ranked among the very highest, if not the highest. Of this time Goethe says: ‘I have abandoned my master Loder for my friend Schiller, and Linnaeus for Shakespeare.’ Yet Goethe, in the midst of poetry, never lost his passion for scientific studies. He seems to have felt instinctively that what contemporary science needed was not only observation, but generalization.”[11] Goethe derived much of his inspiration from Buffon and the German natural philosophers. Unfortunately he never discovered the works of Lamarck, although he anticipated that scientist in some of his work with plants. There can be little doubt that, had Goethe discovered the “Philosophie Zoologique,” he would have accepted its principal doctrine, and would have proclaimed them with a vigor that would have overcome even the antagonism of Cuvier. As it was, he confined his theory to the idea of the “unity of type,” making it the chief basis for his conception of evolution. In his own words, this theory enabled him to “assert, without hesitation, that all the more perfect organic natures, such as fishes, amphibious animals, birds, mammals, and man at the head of the list, were all formed upon one original type, which varies only more or less in parts which are none the less permanent, and which still daily changes and modifies its form by propagation.” Akin to Goethe, in some respects, was Gottfried Treviranus (1776-1837), a German naturalist who was a contemporary of St.-Hilaire, Goethe, and Lamarck. Like the German natural philosophers, he considered life as the result of chemical and mechanical processes, and protested whole-heartedly against purely speculative work, calling it “dreams and visions.” At the same time, he complained that most of botany and zoology was made up of dry registers of names and that the work of many naturalists consisted of the “spirit killing ... reading and writing of compilations.” Treviranus believed that it was quite within the abilities of man to discover the basic philosophy of nature, largely by the use of working hypotheses as a means of aiding the investigator in attaining the actual facts.