change in things themselves, that ‘the idea of metamorphosis’ in the sense of Goethe and Alexander Braun disappears in Nägeli from the field of scientific observation. It has been shown in the previous chapter that what Goethe called the normal or ascending metamorphosis has no scientific meaning unless species are supposed to be variable. It appeared moreover that if the Cryptogams are made the chief subjects of investigation, as Nägeli made them, the so-called metamorphosis of the leaves is a phenomenon of secondary importance, and only attains to its full importance in the Phanerogams. If Schleiden, illogically from his point of view, conceived of metamorphosis as the principle of development, Nägeli on the contrary scarcely employed the word. He regarded the history of development as the law of growth of the organs, and, in accordance with the theory of the constancy of species, the law of growth of every species and every organ was invariable in the same sense in which we apply the term to natural laws in physics and chemistry. In a word, Nägeli’s considerations on the ‘present task of natural history’ in the work above cited, are not only logically and entirely consistent on the principles of the inductive method, but they are also consistent where others have been misled by the theory of the constancy of species into illogical conclusions. Nägeli set himself in earnest to meet the demands of inductive enquiry, such as he had himself described them. It will be shown more in detail in the history of phytotomy, how he satisfied these demands in his refutation of Schleiden’s doctrine of the cell, and in the establishment of his own, and at a later time in the framing of his theory of molecular structure and of the growth of organised bodies, and how he made these investigations true models of genuine inductive enquiry. Here we are concerned only with what he effected in this way for morphology and systematic botany. In this field of research he introduced two innovations of the profoundest importance, which affected both the aim and method of enquiry for some years. He connected his own morphological investigations, as far as possible, with the lower Cryptogams, extending them afterwards to the higher Cryptogams and to the Phanerogams; that is, he proceeded from simple and plain facts to the more difficult, thus not only introducing the Cryptogams into the field of systematic investigation, but making them its starting-point. In this way morphology not only secured a foundation in exact historical development, but it assumed a different aspect, inasmuch as the morphological ideas hitherto drawn from the Phanerogams were now examined by the light of the history of development in the Cryptogams. This was one innovation; the second, closely connected with it, was the way in which Nägeli made the new doctrine of the cell the starting-point of morphology. Both the first commencement of organs and their further growth were carried back to