showing the unity of the whole of nature, Monism points out that only one God exists, and that this God reveals himself in all the phenomena of nature. In grounding all the phenomena of organic or inorganic nature on the universal law of causality, and exhibiting them as the outcome of ‘efficient causes,’ Monism proves that God is the necessary cause of all things and the law itself. In recognising none but divine forces in nature, in proclaiming all natural laws to be divine, Monism rises to the greatest and most lofty conception of which man, the most perfect of all things, is capable, the conception of the unity of God and nature.” The book closes with these words and a quotation from Goethe. It had opened with a quotation from Goethe. Goethe runs through the whole of the two energetic volumes like an old and venerable anthem. The stalwart fighter not only traces his whole Monistic philosophy to Goethe: not only owes to him the very idea of morphology. In front of the second and more strictly Darwinistic volume he has a dedication “to the founders of the theory of evolution,” and between Darwin and Lamarck we find the name of Goethe. It was Haeckel’s firm conviction that Goethe not only believed in the unity of God and nature, but literally in the natural evolution of the various species of animals and plants from each other. In this conviction, which claims Goethe explicitly for Darwin, he has never been shaken, although his own friends and convinced evolutionists (Oscar Schmidt, for instance) have often opposed him on the point. Much has been written since the days of the _General Morphology_ both for and against this Goethe-Darwin theory, but I cannot see that we have got much further with it. I still find that a candid study of some of Goethe’s smaller writings, such as the _History of my Botanical_ _Studies_, the criticism of D’Alton’s _Sloths and Pachyderms_ (which is very important), and several others, compels us to think that Goethe really believed, in a strikingly Darwinian way, in a slow transformation and evolution of animal and plant species in virtue of purely natural laws; and that he always laid great stress on this idea of his as an original notion, far in advance of the professional science of his time. We not only have several clear passages, but the whole point of his argument really rests on this idea. Hence, apart altogether from the pedantry that tries to make a cabalistic mystery out of Goethe’s works, and always reads B for A and C for B, it does seem that there was truth in Haeckel’s first view of the matter, in spite of all the ink that has been shed over it and the vast amount of word-splitting exegesis. Darwinism has, in a certain sense, its German side, even apart from all that Haeckel has done for it. * * * * *