Evolution / by Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson.

  • Geddes, Patrick, Sir, 1854-1932.
Date:
[1911?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Evolution / by Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    anew, here the huge and passive python, and there the small and nimble fer de lance. Once more, for birds, see the contrast of the massive pedestrian dodo with his pigeon cousins; or of giant chickens like the ostrich and emu tribes with exquisite but tiny adults, say the hummingbirds. The kinship of elephant and coney, the contrast of stony glyptodon and gigantic sloth with nimble lemur and agile monkey, and again of bear and dog, of dog and cat, of sheep and goat, are thus re-inter¬ preted together, no longer as for the early Darwinians as so many machine-like com¬ binations of innumerable indefinite variations externally selected from among yet more innumerable ones, nor even among a more limited number of ancestral possibilities, but as so many forms thrown from the rhythmic oscillation of the loom of life. Each of these types or species, with its exquisite intricacy of detail and individuality of pat¬ tern, its marvellous correlation of organs, is thus a new unity created from within by its own interior play and balance of vegetative and reproductive forces, its inner predomin¬ ances here of anabolisms and there of katabol- isms. Growth and arrest, giant and dwarf, rest and movement, sleep and waking, even female and male are contrasts all physio-