D’Arcy Thompson and the Science of Form

Abstract

In 1945, the Public Orator of Oxford lauded D’Arcy Thompson as unicum disciplinae liber allons exemplar ¹; in 1969, the Whole Earth Catalog called his major work ‘a paradigm classic’. Few men can list such diverse distinctions in their compendium of honors. But then, few men have displayed so wide a range of talent. D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860-1948), Professor of Natural History at Dundee and St. Andrews,² translated Aristotle’s Historia Animalium, wrote glossaries of Greek birds and fishes, compiled statistics for the Fishery Board of Scotland and contributed the article on pycnogonids³ to the Cambridge Natural History.⁴ He also wrote a book of one thousand pages, revered by artists and architects as well as by engineers and biologists — the ‘paradigm classic’, On Growth and Form (1917, 2nd edition, 1942). To P. B. Medawar it is “beyond comparison the finest work of literature in all the annals of science that have been recorded in the English tongue.”⁵ To G. Evelyn Hutchinson, it is “one of the very few books on a scientific matter written in this century which will, one may be confident, last as long as our too fragile culture.”⁶ In it D’Arcy Thompson displayed his thoughts on organic form; these are curious in places, almost visionary in others and always profound. Almost thirty years after the second edition, and more than half a century after the first, they have gained new impact in a science that only now has the technology to deal with his insights.

Our own study of organic form, which we call by Goethe’s name of Morphology, is but a portion of that wider Science of Form which deals with the forms assumed by matter under all aspects and conditions, and, in a still wider sense, with forms which are theoretically imaginable.

Growth and Form, p.1026