ABSTRACT
Jean Lamarck and Wolfgang Goethe stand at the head of all the great philosophers of nature who first established a theory of organic development, and who are the illustrious fellow-workers of Charles Darwin. Geoffroy, as the chief of the French nature-philosophers, represented the theory of natural development and the monistic conception of nature. in opposition to Charles Linnaeus’ purely empirical school, a natural-philosophical reaction took place, the moving spirits of which, Jean Lamarck, Geoffroy St. Hilaire, Wolfgang Goethe, and Lorenz Oken, endeavoured by their mental work to introduce light and order into the chaos of the accumulated empirical raw material. Metamorphosis, according to Goethe, consists not merely, as the word is generally understood, in the changes of form which the organic individual experiences during its individual development, but, in a wider sense, in the transformation of organic forms in general.
