Flora Unveiled

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Why, then, should not this latter type of pollination also be a liberation from burden-

some matter, allowing the inherent abundance in the heart of the plant, through the

energy of primary force, to proceed toward endless propagation? ^67

Rather than having anything to do with sex, pollination, according to Schelver, is the

“liberation from burdensome matter.” Once the base, material components have been

removed from the sap and discarded, the pistil spontaneously forms the seed and fruit with-

out the aid of any external agent. Goethe quotes Schelver as saying that the actual stimulus

for seed production occurs underground “in the earth”:

The highest level of vegetative life is the formation of a basis for future reproduction

in which only the pistil is participating ..., fertilization of this basis is taking place in

the earth through the water, air and temperature.^68

Looking back on his conversation with Schelver from the vantage point of 1820, Goethe

admits that at first he was “taken aback” by Schelver’s “heretical” views. But the fact that

Schelver had based his pollination theory on his own theory of metamorphosis was a pow-

erful argument in its favor:

In my nature studies I had religiously accepted the dogma of sexuality in plants and was,

therefore, taken aback now to hear a concept directly opposed to my own. Yet I could not

consider the new theory wholly heretical, for from the account given by the ingenious

[Linnaeus] I could draw the conclusion that [Schelver’s] pollination theory was a natural

consequence of the theory of metamorphosis which seemed to be significant to me.^69

Goethe portrays himself as being intrigued, but not entirely convinced, by Schelver’s theory.

Three years after his conversation with Schelver, however, he makes statements about the nature

of seed formation that seem to place him squarely in the camp of the asexualists. Early in the

essay “Formation and Transformation,” Goethe defines the science of morphology as the study

of the process, or “Bildung,” that gives rise to plants.^70 All living organisms, he states, are com-

plex aggregates of living and independent parts. The “perfection” of an organism is a function

of its complexity, and organisms differ according to their complexity. The simpler the organism,

the greater its imperfection, with “simplicity” being defined as a similarity of its parts:

The more imperfect a creature is, the more do these parts appear identical or similar

to each other and the more do they resemble the whole. ... That a plant or even a tree,

though it appears to be an individual, consists purely of detached parts resembling

both each other and the whole— of this there can be no doubt.^71

Plants, according to Goethe’s definition, are therefore less perfect than animals, as is

demonstrated by the ease with which a mother plant can be cloned, which Goethe states is

the same process as propagation by seeds:

How many plants are indeed propagated by slips! The bud of the least complex variety

of fruit tree puts forth a shoot that in turn produces a number of identical buds; and it