Flora Unveiled

448 i Flora Unveiled

the leaves contract to form the stamen and pistil (only one of each for the sake of propri-
ety), after which they recombine (pollination is not mentioned) in a mystical union that
promptly gives rise to “unnumbered germs ... concealed in the womb”:

Yes, the leaf with its hues feeleth the hand all divine,

And on a sudden contracteth itself; the tenderest figures

Twofold as yet, hasten on, destined to blend into one.

Lovingly now the beauteous pairs are standing together,

Gather’d in countless array, there where the altar is raised.

Hymen hovereth o’er them, and scents delicious and mighty

Stream forth their fragrance so sweet, all things enliv’ning around.

Presently, parcell’d out, unnumber’d germs are seen swelling,

Sweetly conceald in the womb, where is made perfect the fruit.

Here doth Nature close the ring of her forces eternal.^55

Goethe and his contemporaries understood sexual union as the reconciling of opposing (polar)
forces. In the case of plant growth, the outward expansion of the sap is opposed by the contraction
of the spiral vessels. In the vegetative plant, maleness and femaleness co- exist in the Aristotelian
sense of being “combined,” but are at the same time in opposition to one another. Later in life,
Goethe was to speculate that maleness promoted vertical growth, whereas femaleness promoted
spiral growth. During flower formation the opposing sexes separate into “beauteous pairs”—
stamens and pistils. Later, when the two sexes spontaneously “blend into one,” they depolarize
and become a harmonious whole. Goethe considers this moment of consummated self- love,
which presumably ends soon after conception, as a state of spiritual perfection— or, in the words
of the twentieth- century Bohemian- Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, “Narcissus fulfilled.”^56
Soon after Metamorphosis was published in 1790, Goethe learned that his idea that floral
organs are transformed leaves had been published forty- one years earlier by Caspar Friedrich
Wolff in his dissertation Theoria Generationis (1759). Wolff, a staunch Aristotelian, had
been conducting microscopic studies in animals and plants to determine which theory of
embryogenesis— preformationism or epigenesis— was correct. His microscope observations
clearly supported epigenesis in both animals and plants, and his continuous observations of
plant growth and development led him to propose, like Goethe, that floral organs arose as
modifications of leaves.^57 Goethe contrasted Wolff ’s interpretation of plant morphogenesis
with his own in his essay “My Discovery of a Worthy Forerunner,” published in 1817. Whereas
Goethe viewed metamorphosis as an alternating process of leaf expansion and contraction,
Wolff regarded the transition from leaves to flowers as degenerative, involving only contraction:

[Wolff ] saw the same organ always contracting, getting smaller. The fact that this

contraction alternates with expansion, he did not see. He saw it decreased in volume

without noticing that it was at the same time perfecting itself, and he absurdly attrib-

uted to degeneration this path toward perfection.^58

Thirty years later, Goethe was to incorporate Wolff ’s degenerative model into his final
interpretation of pollination.