The most celebrated among Goethe’s writings relating to organic nature is his _Metamorphosis of Plants_, which appeared in 1790, a work which distinctly shows a grasp of the fundamental idea of the theory of development, inasmuch as Goethe, in it, was labouring to point out a single organ, by the infinitely varied development and metamorphosis of which the whole of the endless variety of forms in the world of plants might be conceived to have arisen; this fundamental organ he found in the _leaf_. If at that time the microscope had been generally employed, if Goethe had examined the structure of organisms by the means of the microscope he would have gone still further, and would have seen that the leaf is itself a compound of individual parts of a lower order, that is, of _cells_. He would then not have declared that the leaf, but that the _cell_ is the real fundamental organ by the multiplication, transformation, and combination (synthesis) of which, in the first place, the leaf is formed; and that, in the next place, by transformation, variation, and combination of leaves there arise all the varied beauties in form and colour which we admire in the green parts, as well as in the organs of propagation, or the flowers of plants. Goethe here showed that in order to comprehend the whole of the phenomena, we must in the first place compare them, and, secondly, search for a simple type, a simple fundamental form, of which all other forms are only infinite variations. Something similar to what he had here done for the metamorphosis of plants he then did for the Vertebrate animals, in his celebrated _vertebral theory of the skull_. Goethe was the first to show, independently of Oken, who almost simultaneously arrived at the same thought, that the skull of man and of all Vertebrate animals, in particular mammals, is nothing more than a bony case, formed of the same bones,—that is, vertebræ,—out of which the spine also is composed. The vertebræ of the skull are like those of the spine, bony rings lying behind each other, but in the skull are peculiarly changed and specialized (differentiated). Although this idea has been strongly modified by recent discoveries, yet in Goethe’s day it was one of the greatest advances in comparative anatomy, and was not only one of the first advances towards the understanding of the structure of Vertebrate animals, but at the same time explained many individual phenomena. When two parts of a body, such as the skull and spine, which appear at first sight so different, were proved to be parts originally the same, developed out of one and the same foundation, one of the difficult problems of the philosophy of nature was solved. Here again we meet the notion of a single type—the conception of a single principle, which becomes infinitely varied in the different species, and in the parts of individual species.