NewThoughtLibrary.com / DivineLibrary.org

weather, and exclaimed after a glance, 'It is part of a vertebral column!' When Newton saw the apple fall, the anticipatory question flashed through his mind, 'Why do not the heavenly bodies fall like this apple?' In neither case had accident any important share; Newton and Oken were prepared by the deepest previous study to seize upon the unimportant fact offered to them, and to show how important it might become and if the apple and the deer-skull had been wanting, some other falling body, or some other skull, would have touched the string so ready to vibrate. But in each case there was a great step of anticipation; Oken thought he saw a type of the whole skeleton in a single vertebra, while Newton conceived at once that the whole universe was full of bodies tending to fall. . . The discovery of Goethe, which did for the vegetable kingdom what Oken. did for the animal, that the parts of a plant are to' be regarded as metamorphosed leaves, is an apparent exception to the necessity of disciple for invention, since it was the discovery of a poet in a region to which he seemed to have paid no especial or laborious