On Growth and Form by Thompson, D'Arcy Wentworth - 1942

Cambridge at the University Press, 1942. [A New Edition, 1942]. Illustrated with several hundred graphs and small text figures, thick octavo, pp (ii), 1116, slightly used internally, the last 150 pages have a faint fold mark but not serious, a duplicate from East Malling Research Station with a stamp on the front endpaper and a shelf number on the spine, red cloth a little rubbed and the spine head a little torn; more serious is the fact that the half-title, the frontispiece and the title page have presumably come loose at some time and have been re-inserted using sellotape which is now browned (see illustration). The first edition of 1917 is rare, and this much extended revision not much less so. Later printings are nearly always of the abridged edition. VERY SCARCE. [The first edition has often been seen as the founding statement of an agenda for an analysis of biological phenomena in mathematical terms. Despite obscurities and stylistic idiosyncrasies, it is still referred to in the present age because of its powerful arguments for the importance of physical forces in explaining the morphologies of organisms. The modern reader is likely to find Thompson's style a dominant feature of the writing, particularly in the aspects of his classical background that shows up in his use of allusions and quotations from a vast international range of historical sources. This can appear mannered and more literary than scientific. Nonetheless, the clarity of his meaning is rarely in doubt; the prose is often eloquent and forceful. Thompson's specific intentions have not been fulfilled and his project could be said largely to have failed. The limitations of his approach in detail have become ever more obvious; biology cannot be reduced to mathematics, and now has to look to molecular biology for its foundations. The book covers many topics including the effects of scale on the shape of animals and plants, large ones necessarily being relatively thick in shape; the effects of surface tension in shaping soap films and similar structures such as cells; the logarithmic spiral as seen in mollusc shells and ruminant horns; the arrangement of leaves and other plant parts (phyllotaxis); and Thompson's own method of transformations, showing the changes in shape of animal skulls and other structures on a Cartesian grid. The work is widely admired by biologists, anthropologists and architects among others, but less often read than cited. Peter Medawar explains this as being because it clearly pioneered the use of mathematics in biology, and helped to defeat mystical ideas of vitalism; but that the book is weakened by Thompson's failure to understand the role of evolution and evolutionary history in shaping living structures. Philip Ball and Michael Ruse, on the other hand, suspect that while Thompson argued for physical mechanisms, his rejection of natural selection bordered on vitalism. ]. New Edition. Cloth. Fair.