Perhaps Goethe’s meaning can be realised best if one takes a great work of art—say, the Venus of Milo—and imagines how these different kinds of knowledge would deal with it. Purely analytic anatomy would dissolve the superb artistic form into a rubbish-heap of bits of marble. Chemistry would still further break up these bits of marble into the chemical elements of which every block of marble is ultimately composed. The “form” would disappear altogether. But in this case the form means—the Venus of Milo. We see at once that we need another branch of science and investigation besides anatomy and chemistry: we need a morphology, or science of the complete form in which the block of marble is moulded into the Venus of Milo. In the case of our work of art, morphology would be identical with æsthetics, or at least with a branch of it. There can be no doubt that the first and most imperative need for the establishment of a special science of morphology arises from artistic and æsthetic feelings. It is not without significance that it was founded by the poet Goethe, and elaborated with such great success in the nineteenth century by the born artist Haeckel. However, that does not prevent the analogy of the Venus of Milo, which happens to be a creation of human art, being applied equally to every individualised form in nature, to every crystal, plant, and animal. Goethe himself immediately transferred his morphology into the province of botany with such vigour that the term is still regarded, in its narrower sense, as a technical botanical expression. It extends, however, to the whole world in so far as its contents come before us in “forms.” When Haeckel adopted the term he deliberately restricted it, in harmony with the general definition, by calling his work the “Morphology of Organisms,” or the science of the forms of animals and plants. But there was one danger in the conception of a morphology of animals and plants, namely, the danger of taking it to mean a purely external description: so many thousand species of plants, soberly described, labelled, and numbered, a huge cabinet of stuffed skins, a herbarium of hay. A whole scientific school had really taken it in this sense since Goethe’s time; much as if one were to think æsthetics consisted simply in forming an illustrated catalogue of all the art-treasures in the world, a realistic catalogue in which the marble statues from the Parthenon and the Moses of Michael Angelo would simply be given as number so-and-so in class so-and-so.