Page:The Works of J. W. von Goethe, Volume 14.djvu/25

9 harmony, which must be studied in the Whole, or else it is nothing but a dead letter. From this point of view I have written the little essay, and that is, properly speaking, the interest which lies hidden in it."

The discovery is significant, therefore, as an indication of his tendency to regard Nature in her unity. It was the prelude to his discoveries of the metamorphosis of plants, and of the vertebral theory of the skull: all three resting on the same mode of conceiving Nature. His botanical studies received fresh impulse at this period. Linnæus was a constant companion on his journeys, and we see him with eagerness avaihng himself of all that the observations and collections of botanists could offer him in aid of his own. " My geological speculations," he writes to the Frau von Stein, "make progress. I see much more than the others who accompany me, because I have discovered certain fundamental laws of formation, which I keep secret, and can from them better observe and judge the phenomena before me.... Every one exclaims about my solitude, which is a riddle, because no one knows with what glorious unseen beings I hold communion." It is interesting to observe his delight at seeing a zebra — which was a novelty in Germany — and his inexhaustible pleasure in the elephant's skull, which he had procured for study. Men confined to their libraries, whose thoughts scarcely venture beyond the circle of literature, have spoken with sarcasm, and with pity, of this waste of time. But — dead bones for dead bones — there is as much poetry in the study of an elephant's skull as in the study of those skeletons of the past — history and classics. All depends upon the mind of the student; to one man a few old bones will awaken thoughts of the great organic processes of Nature, thoughts as far-reaching and sublime as those which the fragments of the past awaken in the historical mind. Impressed with this conviction, the