Metamorphosis of Plants

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the great German poet and philosopher published in 1790 the seminal essay Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären, known in English as Metamorphosis of Plants. In this work, Goethe essentially discovered the (serially) homologous nature of leaf organs in plants, from cotyledons, to photosynthetic leaves, to the petals of a flower. Although Richard Owen, the powerful British vertebrate anatomist (and staunch opponent of Charles Darwin), is generally credited with first articulating a definition of the word “homology” (in 1843), it is clear that Goethe had already arrived at a sophisticated view of homology and transformation (within an idealist morphological perspective) more than fifty years earlier.