In the previous chapter we saw some of the possible routes through which the organicist tradition travelled. I sketched, in a very general and synthetic way, the network that from Kant onwards guaranteed the diffusion and extension of a specific research programme that – notwithstanding its idiosyncrasies and contradictions – directed the aims and methods of many naturalists active in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this chapter, we will see more in detail the way this tradition (which I have dubbed Romantic biology) was translated, transformed and re-proposed by two important scientists mainly active during the first half of the twentieth century: J. S. Haldane and D'Arcy Thompson. As I mentioned earlier, when Haldane delivered his paper at the History of Science Congress in 1931, he was recognized as one of the leading physiologists in England. Born in Edinburgh in 1860, Haldane studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and, like many biologists of his generation, spent part of his training in Germany, particularly in Jena, where he attended the lectures of J. W. Dobereiner, J. Loder, E. Haeckel and the famous botanist E. Strasburger. Throughout his life, Haldane was a staunch supporter of German biology and philosophy. He loved and praised Goethe's philosophy and science, and acquired a deep knowledge of Kant's critical philosophy and Hegel's idealism through the acquaintance of the British idealists. In his first publication, an article written together with his brother Robert, Kant's bio-philosophy was explicitly discussed. One of the venerable conclusions of this early work is striking and demonstrates the overwhelming pervasiveness of Kantian philosophy and its wide diffusion: