Reconstructing long-vanished and unknown epochs, even whole Cultures of the past, by means of morphological connexions, in much the same way as modern palæontology deduces far-reaching and trustworthy conclusions as to skeletal structure and species from a single unearthed skull-fragment. It is possible, given the physiognomic rhythm, to recover from scattered details of ornament, building, script, or from odd political, economic and religious data, the organic characters of whole centuries of history, and from known elements on the scale of art-expression, to find corresponding elements on the scale of political forms, or from that of mathematical forms to read that of economic. This is a truly Goethian method—rooted in fact in Goethe’s conception of the _prime phenomenon_— which is already to a limited extent current in comparative zoology, but can be extended, to a degree hitherto undreamed of, over the whole field of history. ----- Footnote 93: In English the word “cast” will evidently satisfy the sense better on occasion. The word “stil” will therefore not necessarily be always rendered “style.”—_Tr._ Footnote 94: See Vol. II, pp. 109 et seq. Footnote 95: See Vol. II, pp. 36 et seq. Footnote 96: I will only mention here the distances apart of the three Punic Wars, and the series—likewise comprehensible only as rhythmic—Spanish Succession War, Silesian wars, Napoleonic Wars, Bismarck’s wars, and the World War (cf. Vol. II, p. 488). Connected with this is the spiritual relation of grandfather and grandson, a relation which produces in the mind of primitive peoples the conviction that the soul of the grandfather returns in the grandson, and has originated the widespread custom of giving the grandson the grandfather’s _name_, which by its mystic spell binds his soul afresh to the corporeal world. Footnote 97: The word is used in the sense in which biology employs it, viz., to describe the process by which the embryo traverses all the phases which its species has undergone.—_Tr._ Footnote 98: The first draft of _Faust I_, discovered only comparatively recently.— _Tr._ Footnote 99: See Ency. Brit., XIth Ed., articles _Owen, Sir Richard; Morphology and Zoology_ (p. 1029).—_Tr._ Footnote 100: