Internal Lagrangians of PDEs as variational principles

A description of how the principle of stationary action reproduces itself in terms of the intrinsic geometry of variational equations is proposed. A notion of stationary points of an internal Lagrangian is introduced. A connection between symmetries, conservation laws and internal Lagrangians is established. Noether's theorem is formulated in terms of internal Lagrangians. A relation between non-degenerate Lagrangians and the corresponding internal Lagrangians is investigated. Several examples are discussed.