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

by E. S. Russell

With the great exception of Aristotle, the philosophers of Greece and Rome made little contribution to morphological theory. Passing mention may be made of the Atomists—Leucippus, Democritus, and their great disciple Lucretius, who in his magnificent poem "De Natura Rerum" gave impassioned expression to the materialistic conception of the universe. But the full effect of materialism upon morphology does not become apparent till the rise of physiology in the 17th and 18th centuries, and reaches its culmination in the 19th century. The evolutionary ideas of Lucretius exercised no immediate influence upon the development of morphology.

[1] E. Zeller, Greek Philosophy, Eng. trans., i., 522 f.n., London 1881. Other particulars as to Alcmaeon in T. Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, Eng. trans., i., London, 1901.

[2] Zeller, loc. cit., i., p. 297.

[3] Gomperz, loc. cit., i., p. 244.

[4] R. Burckhardt, Biologie u. Humanismus, p. 85, Jena, 1907.

[5] See the interesting account of Aristotle's biological work in Prof. D'Arcy W. Thompson's Herbert Spencer lecture (1913) and his translation of the Historia Animalium in the Oxford series.

[6] On Aristotle's forerunners, see R. Burckhardt, "Das koïsche Tiersystem, eine Vorstufe des zoologischen Systematik des Aristoteles." Verh. Naturf. Ges. Basel, xx., 1904.

[7] T. E. Lones, Aristotle's Researches in Natural Science, pp. 82-3, London, 1912.

[8] De Partibus Animalium, i., 4, 644^a trans. W. Ogle, Oxford, 1911.

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