Form and Function: A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology

To write a history of contemporary movements from a purely objective standpoint is well recognised to be an impossible task. It is difficult for those in the stream to see where...

Pander's work of 1817 was the forerunner of an embryological period in which men's hopes and interest centred round the study of development. "With bewilderment we saw ourselves...

It is a remarkable fact that morphology took but a very little part in the formation of evolution-theory. When one remembers what powerful arguments for evolution can be drawn f...

E. Geoffrey made an experiment, unsuccessful but instructive. He tried to found a science of pure morphology; he failed: his failure showed, once and for all, that a pure morpho...

The influence of the cell-theory on morphology was not altogether happy. The cell-theory was from the first physiological; cells were looked upon as centres of force rather than...

At the time when Darwin's work appeared there already existed, as we have seen, a fully formed morphology with set and definite principles. The aim of this pre-evolutionary morp...

With the founding of the cell-theory by Schwann in 1839 an important step was taken in the analysis of the degrees of composition of the animal body. Aristotle had distinguished...

Von Baer was recognised as the founder of embryology even by his contemporaries. His predecessors, Aristotle,[166] Fabricius,[167] Harvey,[168] Malpighi,[169] Haller,[170] Wolff...

Until well into the 'eighties animal morphology remained a purely descriptive science, content to state and summarise the relations between the coexistent and successive form-st...

Haeckel and Gegenbaur set the fashion for phylogenetic speculation, and up to the middle 'eighties, when the voice of the sceptics began to make itself heard, the chief concern...

The first name of which the history of anatomy keeps record is that of Alcmaeon, a contemporary of Pythagoras (6th century B.C.). His interests appear to have been rather physio...

Some functions, he says,[41] are common to all organised bodies--origin by generation, growth by nutrition, end by death. There are also secondary functions. Of these the most i...

For two thousand years after Aristotle little advance was made upon his comparative anatomy. Knowledge of the human body was increased not long after his death by Herophilus and...

To complete our historical survey of the morphology of the early 19th century we have now to turn back some way and consider the curious development of morphological thought in...

In his papers of 1866 and 1867 Kowalevsky had remarked upon the widespread occurrence of a certain type or fundamental plan of early embryonic development, characterised by the...

"Of late the attempt to arrange genealogical trees involving hypothetical groups has come to be the subject of some ridicule, perhaps deserved. But since this is what modern mor...

We have laid stress upon the distinction established by Roux between the two stages of development--the automatic and the functional--because of the light which it seems to thro...

His chief follower was Serres, who is mentioned indeed in the _Philosophie anatomique_ as a fellow-worker. Serres was primarily a medical anatomist; his interest lay in human an...

Richard Owen is the epigonos of transcendental morphology; in him its guiding ideas find clear expression, and in his writings are no half-truths struggling for utterance. But h...

Science, in so far as it rises above the mere accumulation of facts, is a product of the mind's creative activity. Scientific theories are not so much formulae extracted from ex...