Biology / by Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson.

  • Geddes, Patrick, Sir, 1854-1932.
Date:
[1925]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

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

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    not only by the Babylonian story of Creation, but by its “ Miltonic ” statement, as Huxley was wont to call it. But thanks not only to advances in other sciences—astronomy and geology on the naturalistic side, philology, history and others upon the humanistic— but also to liberation common to all these through social changes, and their interpreta¬ tions, stated, however vaguely, as “ Pro¬ gress ”—our biologic enquiries have turned more and more clearly towards understanding the organic progress (for biology, however, including decline as well as rise) which we call Evolution. To understand this, and its rationale, for the different species and groups of life, is termed Phylogeny (race-genesis); which rationalises, as far as may be, our previously but descriptive Paleontography into Paleontology proper, and with this our (enlarged) Taxonomy together. The com- plemental enquiries of Ontogeny (individual genesis) are towards rationalising our empiric observations of individual develop¬ ment (Embryography), and thus explaining its changes and phases, as Embryology proper. These two evolutionary sub-sciences have to be taken together in their full and united sweep, as Evolution. Yet in this field we have to go beyond the earlier view of evolution—so predominant, and indeed so necessary, since Darwin’s day—as essentially an historic enquiry into origins : to turn these forward, more and more clearly—as c