the shape of the clouds, all these are so many riddles of form, so many problems of morphology, and all of them the physicist can more or less easily read and adequately solve: solving them by reference to their antecedent phenomena, in the material system of mechanical forces to which they belong, and to which we interpret them as being due. They have also, doubtless, their immanent teleological significance; but it is on another plane of thought from the physicistãs that we contemplate their intrinsic harmony and perfection, and ãsee that they are good.ã
Nor is it otherwise with the material forms of living things. Cell and tissue, shell and bone, leaf and flower, are so many portions of matter, and it is in obedience to the laws of physics that their particles have been moved, moulded and conformed16. {8} They are no exception to the rule that ööçç¡ü Ã¥öçÃ§Ñ ö°öçüö¥öçüüöçâ. Their problems of form are in the first instance mathôÙeôÙmatôÙiôÙcal problems, and their problems of growth are essentially physical problems; and the morphologist is, ipso facto, a student of physical science.
Apart from the physico-chemical problems of modern physiology, the road of physico-mathôÙeôÙmatôÙiôÙcal or dynamical inôÙvesôÙtiôÙgaôÙtion in morphology has had few to follow it; but the pathway is old. The way of the old Ionian physicians, of Anaxagoras17, of Empedocles and his disciples in the days before Aristotle, lay just by that highwayside. It was Galileoãs and Borelliãs way. It was little trodden for long afterwards, but once in a while Swammerdam and Rûˋaumur looked that way. And of later years, Moseley and Meyer, Berthold, Errera and Roux have been among the little band of travellers. We need not wonder if the way be hard to follow, and if these wayfarers have yet gathered little. A harvest has been reaped by others, and the gleaning of the grapes is slow.
It behoves us always to remember that in physics it has taken great men to discover simple things. They are very great names indeed that we couple with the explanation of the path of a stone, the droop of a chain, the tints of a bubble, the shadows in a cup. It is but the slightest adumbration of a dynamical morphology that we can hope to have, until the physicist and the mathematician shall have made these problems of ours their own, or till a new Boscovich shall have written for the naturalist the new Theoria Philosophiae Naturalis.
How far, even then, mathematics will suffice to describe, and physics to explain, the fabric of the body no man can foresee. It may be that all the laws of energy, and all the properties of matter, and all the chemistry of all the colloids are as powerless to explain the body as they are impotent to comprehend the soul. For my part, I think it is not so. Of how it is that the soul informs the body, physical science teaches me nothing: consciousness is not explained to my comprehension by all the nerve-paths and ãneuronesã of the physiologist; nor do I ask of physics how goodness shines in one manãs face, and evil betrays itself in another. But of the construction and growth and working {9} of the body, as of all that is of the earth earthy, physical science is, in my humble opinion, our only teacher and guide18.
Often and often it happens that our physical knowledge is inadequate to explain the mechanical working of the organism; the phenomena are superlatively complex, the procedure is involved and entangled, and the inôÙvesôÙtiôÙgaôÙtion has occupied but a few short lives of men. When physical science falls short of explaining the order which reigns throughout these manifold phenomena,ãan order more charôÙacôÙterôÙisôÙtic in its totality than any of its phenomena in themselves,ãmen hasten to invoke a guiding principle, an entelechy, or call it what you will. But all the while, so far as I am aware, no physical law, any more than that of gravity itself, not even among the puzzles of chemical ãstereometry,ã or of physiological ãsurface-actionã or ãosmosis,ã is known to be transgressed by the bodily mechanism.