All the intellectual forces that had had any influence upon Haeckel now concentrated for a supreme achievement. First of these was Goethe, who supplied the title, “Morphology.” In its simplest signification morphology is merely “the science of forms.” If I take houses, furniture, statues, fishes, flowers, crystals, &c., and only regard and describe their forms, I am a morphologist in the literal sense of the word. But when Goethe invented the term he sought to give it a more restricted application, writing in the style of earlier days, but clearly enough, at Jena in 1807. We have, he says, natural objects before us, especially living objects. We try to penetrate the secrets of their nature and their action. We are not merely observers, but philosophers. It is from this point of view that we approach the subject. It appears to us that the best way to proceed is to separate the various parts. Such a procedure seems calculated to take us very far. Chemistry and anatomy are instances of this analytic kind of research, and both are greatly esteemed and successful. But this method has its limitations. “We can easily break up the living thing into its elements, but we cannot put these together again and restore them to life. We cannot do this in the case of many inorganic, to say nothing of organic, bodies.” What are we to do? “Hence,” Goethe continues, “even scientific men have at all times had an impulse to recognise living things as such, to grasp connectedly their external visible and tangible parts, and take these as indications of the inner life, and thus in a sense to compass the whole in one glance.” “Hence we find at the threshold of art and knowledge and science a number of attempts to establish and elaborate a science that we may call _morphology_.”