On Growth and Form by D'ArcyWentworth Thompson

First published: 1917

Type of work: Science

Form and Content

On Growth and Form appeared in the summer of 1917, the second of four books D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson produced in a long career as scientist, author, translator, and editor. His only volume on a strictly scientific subject, On Growth and Form was conceived by the author around 1912 and had been promised to Cambridge University Press as a little book to cost no more than two or three shillings. In the course of distilling nearly three decades of observations on the forms of plants and animals, Thompson saw his book grow to more than eight hundred pages of text and illustrations; many delays in its preparation were caused by Thompson’s severe criticism of his own writing as well as by wartime conditions.

At the time of the book’s publication, Thompson’s career had already encompassed diverse scientific studies as well as digressions into mathematics, classical literature, poetry, and philosophy. On Growth and Form was by intention both a scientific work and an evocation of the seemingly boundless universe of organic and inorganic form which had been revealed by modern science. Thompson’s appreciation of poetry and classical literature played a significant part in its writing, and the enormous impression made by the book on its first appearance was based on its style perhaps as much as on its author’s scientific achievements.

By 1922 the first edition of On Growth and Form was sold out, but Thompson would not then agree to its reprinting. In the 1930’s and early 1940’s, he completed a revision of the book which appeared in 1942 and has been reprinted frequently. In 1961, an abridged edition was prepared in the light of a widespread recognition that the 1917 version was, in some ways, a better book than the 1942 edition, in which Thompson had expanded the original text by more than three hundred pages without giving attention to necessary revisions.

Thompson has been called one of the last of the “scientist-naturalists,” and a nature lover’s passion for observation is the mainspring of much of his work as an author. On Growth and Form has two related objectives: to describe the visible forms of plants and animals—including microscopic structures—and to reveal the mathematics that underlies the vast variety of organic form. Though it is for the most part comprehensible to the layman, the text of On Growth and Form is augmented with lengthy and detailed footnotes and contains many quoted passages in French, German, Latin, and Greek. Formulas requiring a significant background in mathematics for their full comprehension are included in the text, but they rarely impede its flow. Thompson is said to have been an outstanding lecturer, and the skills of an able and considerate public speaker are evident throughout the book, both in its structure and in its language. Particularly effective is the author’s provision of hundreds of drawings and diagrams to illustrate the issues raised in the text; in some cases, these become an almost autonomous source of interest.

Critical Context

The position of On Growth and Form in the history of the biological sciences is somewhat unusual. It is one of the very few books written by a twentieth century scientist to be celebrated as a classic, yet neither the book nor its author rates mention in many comprehensive and reliable guides to modern biology. Despite the status of On Growth and Form in England and the United States, its influence has been intangible and indirect; few scientists, artists, and writers have directly acknowledged Thompson’s legacy. P.B. Medawar has observed that there is little that can be traced in “pedigrees of teaching or research” to the book or to the scientific career on which it was based.

Thompson’s analysis of form, which appeals almost equally to scientific and aesthetic modes of experience, stands apart from the conventional cultural relationships of the arts and the sciences, which continue to maintain a high degree of professional specialization and ideological exclusivity. Thompson’s life’s work, diversified by successful endeavors in classics and mathematics, embodies an alternative to this situation, but his example has had less currency than might have been hoped. In an essay titled “Literature and Science,” Aldous Huxley recalls T.H. Huxley’s advocacy of “a primarily scientific education, tempered . . . with plenty of history, sociology, English literature and foreign languages” and contrasted it with Matthew Arnold’s plea for “a primarily humanistic and specifically classical education, tempered by enough science to make its recipients understand the singularly un-Hellenic world in which they find themselves living.” Thompson, the son of a poet and teacher of literature, and himself the recipient of a fine classical education, transcends the dichotomy of science and art that Huxley and others have found so problematic.

Bibliography

Bonner, John Tyler. Introduction to On Growth and Form, by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, 1961 (revised edition).

Hutchinson, G.E. “In Memoriam: D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson,” in American Scientist. XXXVI (October, 1948), pp. 577-606.

Le Gros Clark, W.E. Medawar, and P.B. Medawar, eds. Essays on Growth and Form Presented to D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, 1945.

Thompson, Ruth D’Arcy. D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson: The Scholar-Naturalist, 1860-1948, 1958.

Whyte, Lancelot Law, ed. Aspects of Form: A Symposium on Form in Nature and Art, 1951.