Form and Function Part 1

Form and Function.

by E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell.

PREFACE

This book is not intended to be a full or detailed history of animal morphology: a complete account is given neither of morphological discoveries nor of morphological theories. My aim has been rather to call attention to the existence of diverse typical att.i.tudes to the problems of form, and to trace the interplay of the theories that have arisen out of them.

The main currents of morphological thought are to my mind three--the functional or synthetic, the formal or transcendental, and the materialistic or disintegrative.

The first is a.s.sociated with the great names of Aristotle, Cuvier, and von Baer, and leads easily to the more open vitalism of Lamarck and Samuel Butler. The typical representative of the second att.i.tude is E.

Geoffroy St. Hilaire, and this habit of thought has greatly influenced the development of evolutionary morphology.

The main battle-ground of these two opposing tendencies is the problem of the relation of function to form. Is function the mechanical result of form, or is form merely the manifestation of function or activity?

What is the essence of life--organisation or activity?

The materialistic att.i.tude is not distinctively biological, but is common to practically all fields of thought. It dates back to the Greek atomists, and the triumph of mechanical science in the 19th century has induced many to accept materialism as the only possible scientific method. In biology it is more akin to the formal than to the functional att.i.tude.

In the course of this book I have not hidden my own sympathy with the functional att.i.tude. It appears to me probable that more insight will be gained into the real nature of life and organisation by concentrating on the active response of the animal, as manifested both in behaviour and in morphogenesis, particularly in the post-embryonic stages, than by giving attention exclusively to the historical aspect of structure, as is the custom of "pure morphology." I believe we shall only make progress in this direction if we frankly adopt the simple everyday conception of living things--which many of us have had drilled out of us--that they are active, purposeful agents, not mere complicated aggregations of protein and other substances. Such an att.i.tude is probably quite as sound philosophically as the opposing one, but I have not in this place attempted any justification of it. I have touched very lightly upon the controversy between vitalism and materialism which has been revived with the early years of the present century. It hardly lends itself as yet to historical treatment, and I could hardly hope to maintain with regard to it that objective att.i.tude which should characterise the historian.

The main result I hope to have achieved with this book is the demonstration, tentative and incomplete as it is, of the essential continuity of animal morphology from the days of Aristotle down to our own time. It is unfortunately true that modern biology, perhaps in consequence of the great advances it has made in certain directions, has to a considerable extent lost its historical consciousness, and if this book helps in any degree to counteract this tendency so far as animal morphology is concerned, it will have served its purpose.

I owe a debt of grat.i.tude to my friends Dr James F. Gemmill and Prof.

J. Arthur Thomson for much kindly encouragement and helpful criticism.

The credit for the ill.u.s.trations is due to my wife, Mrs Jehanne A.

Russell. One is from Nature; the others are drawn from the original figures.

E.S.R.

CHELSEA, 1916.

CHAPTER I

THE BEGINNINGS OF COMPARATIVE ANATOMY

The first name of which the history of anatomy keeps record is that of Alcmaeon, a contemporary of Pythagoras (6th century B.C.). His interests appear to have been rather physiological than anatomical. He traced the chief nerves of sense to the brain, which he considered to be the seat of the soul, and he made some good guesses at the mechanism of the organs of special sense. He showed that, contrary to the received opinion, the seminal fluid did not originate in the spinal cord. Two comparisons are recorded of his, one that p.u.b.erty is the equivalent of the flowering time in plants, the other that milk is the equivalent of white of egg.[1] Both show his bias towards looking at the functional side of living things. The latter comparison reappears in Aristotle.

A century later Diogenes of Apollonia gave a description of the venous system. He too placed the seat of sensation in the brain. He a.s.sumed a vital air in all living things, being in this influenced by Anaximenes whose primitive matter was infinite air. In following out this thought he tried to prove that both fishes and oysters have the power of breathing.[2]

A more strictly morphological note is struck by a curious saying of Empedocles (4th century B.C.), that "hair and foliage and the thick plumage of birds are one."[3]

In the collected writings of Hippocrates and his school, the _Corpus Hippocratic.u.m_, of which no part is later than the end of the 5th century, there are recorded many anatomical facts. The author of the treatise "On the Muscles" knew, for instance, that the spinal marrow is different from ordinary marrow and has membranes continuous with those of the brain. Embryos of seven days (!) have all the parts of the body plainly visible. Work on comparative embryology is contained in the treatise "On the Development of the Child."[4]

The author of the treatise "On the Joints," which Littre calls "the great surgical monument of antiquity," is to be credited with the first systematic attempt at comparative anatomy, for he compared the human skeleton with that of other Vertebrates.

Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)[5] may fairly be said to be the founder of comparative anatomy, not because he was specially interested in problems of "pure morphology," but because he described the structure of many animals and cla.s.sified them in a scientific way. We shall discuss here the morphological ideas which occur in his writings upon animals--in the _Historia Animialium_, the _De Partibus Animalium_, and the _De Generatione Animalium_.

The _Historia Animalium_ is a most comprehensive work, in some ways the finest text-book of Zoology ever written. Certainly few modern text-books take such a broad and sane view of living creatures.

Aristotle never forgets that form and structure are but one of the many properties of living things; he takes quite as much interest in their behaviour, their ecology, distribution, comparative physiology.

He takes a special interest in the comparative physiology of reproduction. The _Historia Animalium_ contains a description of the form and structure of man and of as many animals as Aristotle was acquainted with--and he was acquainted with an astonishingly large number. The later _De Partibus Animalium_ is a treatise on the causes of the form and structure of animals. Owing to the importance which Aristotle ascribed to the final cause this work became really a treatise on the functions of the parts, a discussion of the problems of the relation of form to function, and the adaptedness of structure.

Aristotle was quite well aware that each of the big groups of animals was built upon one plan of structure, which showed endless variations "in excess and defect" in the different members of the group. But he did not realise that this fact of community of plan const.i.tuted a problem in itself. His interest was turned towards the functional side of living things, form was for him a secondary result of function.

Yet he was not unaware of facts of form for which he could not quite find a place in his theory of organic form, facts of form which were not, at first sight at least, facts of function. Thus he was aware of certain facts of "correlation," which could not be explained off-hand as due to correlation of the functions of the parts. He knew, for instance, that all animals without front teeth in the upper jaw have cotyledons, while most that have front teeth on both jaws and no horns have no cotyledons (_De Gen._, ii. 7).

Speaking generally, however, we find in Aristotle no purely morphological concepts. What then does morphology owe to Aristotle? It owes to him, _first_, a great ma.s.s of facts about the structure of animals; _second_, the first scientific cla.s.sification of animals;[6]

_third_, a clear enunciation of the fact of community of plan within each of the big groups; _fourth_, an attempt to explain certain instances of the correlation of parts; _fifth_, a pregnant distinction between h.o.m.ogeneous and heterogeneous parts; _sixth_, a generalisation on the succession of forms in development; and _seventh_, the first enunciation of the idea of the _ech.e.l.le des etres_.

(1) What surprises the modern reader of the _Historia Animalium_ perhaps more than anything else is the extent and variety of Aristotle's knowledge of animals. He describes more than 500 kinds.[7]

Not only does he know the ordinary beasts, birds, and fishes with which everyone is acquainted, but he knows a great deal about cuttlefish, snails and oysters, about crabs, crawfish (_Palinurus_), lobsters, shrimps, and hermit crabs, about sea-urchins and starfish, sea-anemones and sponges, about ascidians (which seem to have puzzled him not a little!). He has noticed even fish-lice and intestinal worms, both flat and round. Of the smaller land animals, he knows a great many insects and their larvae. The extent of his anatomical knowledge is equally surprising, and much of it is clearly the result of personal observation. No one can read his account of the internal anatomy of the chameleon (_Hist. Anim._, ii.), or his description of the structure of cuttlefish (_Hist. Anim._, iv), or that touch in the description of the hermit crab (_Hist. Anim._, iv.)--" Two large eyes ... not ... turned on one side like those of crabs, but straight forward"--without being convinced that Aristotle is speaking of what he has seen. Naturally he could not make much of the anatomy of small insects and snails, and, to tell the truth, he does not seem to have cared greatly about the minutiae of structure. He was too much of a Greek and an aristocrat to care about laborious detail.

Not only did he lay a foundation for comparative anatomy, but he made a real start with comparative embryology. Medical men before him had known many facts about human development; Aristotle seems to have been the first to study in any detail the development of the chick. He describes this as it appears to the naked eye, the position of the embryo on the yolk, the palpitating spot at the third day, the formation of the body and of the large sightless eyes, the veins on the yolk, the embryonic membranes, of which he distinguished two.

(2) Aristotle had various systems of cla.s.sifying animals. They could be cla.s.sified, he thought, according to their structure, their manner of reproduction, their manner of life, their mode of locomotion, their food, and so on. Thus you might, in addition to structural cla.s.sifications, divide animals into gregarious, solitary and social, or land animals into troglodytes, surface-dwellers, and burrowers (_Hist. Anim._, i.).

He knew that dichotomous cla.s.sifications were of little use for animals (_De Partibus_, i. 3) and he explicitly and in so many words accepted the principle of all "natural" cla.s.sification, that affinities must be judged by comparing not one but the sum total of characters. As everyone knows, he was the first to distinguish the big groups of animals, many of which were already distinguished roughly by the common usages of speech. Among his Sanguinea he did little more than define with greater exact.i.tude the limits of the groups established by the popular cla.s.sification. Among the "exsanguineous"

animals, however, corresponding to our Invertebrates, he established a much more definite cla.s.sification than the popular, which is apt to call them indiscriminately "sh.e.l.lfish," "insects," or "creeping things." He went beyond the superficialities of popular cla.s.sification, too, in clearly separating Cetacea from fishes. He had some notion of species and genera in our sense. He distinguished many species of cuttlefish--_Octopus (Polypus)_ of which there were many kinds, _Eledone (Moschites)_ which he knew to have only one row of suckers while _Octopus_ has two, _Argonauta, Nautilus, Sepia_, and apparently _Loligo media_ (= his Teuthis) and _L. vulgaris_(or _forbesii_) which seems to be his Teuthos. He had a grasp of the principles which should be followed in judging of the natural affinities of species. For example, he knew that the cuckoo resembles a hawk. "But," he says, "the hawk has crooked talons, which the cuckoo has not, nor does it resemble the hawk in the form of its head, but in these respects is more like the pigeon than the hawk, which it resembles in nothing but its colour; the markings, however, upon the hawk are like lines, while the cuckoo is spotted" (_Hist. Anim._, Cresswell's trans., p. 147, London, 1862).

The groups he distinguished were--man, viviparous quadrupeds, oviparous quadrupeds, birds, fishes, Cetacea, Cephalopoda, Malacostraca (= higher Crustacea), Insecta (= annulose animals), Testacea (= molluscs, echinoderms, ascidians). A cla.s.s of Acalephae, including sea-anemones and sponges, was grouped with the Testacea. The first five groups were cla.s.sed together as sanguineous, the others as exsanguineous, from the presence or absence of red blood.

Besides these cla.s.ses "there are," he says, "many other creatures in the sea which it is not possible to arrange in any cla.s.s from their scarcity" (Creswell, _loc. cit._, p. 90).

(3) Aristotle's greatest service to morphology is his clear recognition of the unity of plan holding throughout each of the great groups.

He recognises this most clearly in the case of man and the viviparous quadrupeds, with whose structure he was best acquainted. In the _Historia Animalium_ he takes man as a standard, and describes his external and internal parts in detail, then considers viviparous quadrupeds and compares them with man. "Whatever parts a man has before, a quadruped has beneath; those that are behind in man form the quadruped's back" (Cresswell, _loc. cit._, p. 26). Apes, monkeys, and Cynocephali combine the characteristics of man and quadrupeds. He notices that all viviparous quadrupeds have hair. Oviparous quadrupeds resemble the viviparous, but they lack some organs, such as ears with an external pinna, mammae, hair. Oviparous bipeds, or birds, also "have many parts like the animals described above." He does not, however, seem to realise that a bird's wings are the equivalent of a mammal's arms or fore-legs. Fishes are much more divergent; they possess no neck, nor limbs, nor t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es (meaning a solid ovoid body such as the testis in mammals), nor mammae. Instead of hair they have scales.

Speaking generally, the Sanguinea differ from man and from one another in their parts, which may be present or absent, or exhibit differences in "excess and defect," or in form. Unity of plan extends to all the princ.i.p.al systems of organs. "All sanguineous animals have either a bony or a spinous column. The remainder of the bones exist in some animals; but not in others, for if they have the limbs they have the bones belonging to them" (Cresswell, _loc. cit._, p. 60). "Viviparous animals with blood and feet do not differ much in their bones, but rather by a.n.a.logy, in hardness, softness, and size" (Cresswell, _loc.

cit._, p. 59). The venous system, too, is built upon the same general plan throughout the Sanguinea. "In all sanguineous animals, the nature and origin of the princ.i.p.al veins are the same, but the mult.i.tude of smaller veins is not alike in all, for neither are the parts of the same nature, nor do all possess the same parts" (Cresswell, _loc.

cit._, p. 56). It will be noticed in the first and last of these three quotations that Aristotle recognises the fact of correlation between systems of organs,--between limbs and bones, and between blood-vessels and the parts to which they go.

Sanguineous animals all possess certain organs--heart, liver, spleen, kidneys, and so on. Other organs occur in most of the cla.s.ses--the oesophagus and the lungs. "The position which these parts occupy is the same in all animals [sc. Sanguinea]" (Cresswell, _loc. cit._, p.

39).

Unity of plan is observable not only in the Sanguinea, but also within each of the other large groups. Aristotle recognises that all his cuttlefish are alike in structure. Among his Malacostraca he compares point by point the external parts of the carabus (_Palinurus_), and the astacus (_Homarus_), and he compares also the general internal anatomy of the various "genera" he distinguishes. As regards Testacea, he writes, "The nature of their internal structure is similar in all, especially in the turbinated animals, for they differ in size and in the relations of excess; the univalves and bivalves do not exhibit many differences" (Cresswell, _loc. cit._, p. 83). There is an interesting remark about "the creature called carcinium"

(hermit-crab), that it "resembles both the Malacostraca and the Testacea, for this in its nature is similar to the animals that are like carabi, and it is born naked" (Cresswell, _loc. cit._, p. 85). In the last phrase we may perhaps read the first recognition of the embryological criterion.

With the recognition of unity of plan within each group necessarily goes the recognition of what later morphology calls the h.o.m.ology of parts. The parts of a horse can be compared one by one with the parts of another viviparous quadruped; in all the animals belonging to the same cla.s.s the parts are the same, only they differ in excess or defect--these remarks are placed in the forefront of the _Historia Animalium_. Generally speaking, parts which bear the same name are for Aristotle h.o.m.ologous throughout the cla.s.s. But he goes further and notes the essential resemblance underlying the differences of certain parts. He cla.s.ses together nails and claws, the spines of the hedgehog, and hair, as being h.o.m.ologous structures. He says that teeth are allied to bones, whereas horns are more nearly allied to skin (_Hist. Anim._, iii.). This is an astonishingly happy guess, considering that all he had to go upon was the observation that in black animals the horns are black but the teeth white. One cannot but admire the way in which Aristotle fixes upon apparently trivial and commonplace facts, and draws from them far-reaching consequences. He often goes wrong, it is true, but he always errs in the grand manner.

While Aristotle certainly recognised the existence of h.o.m.ologies, and even had a feeling for them, he did not clearly distinguish h.o.m.ology from a.n.a.logy. He comes pretty near the distinction in the following pa.s.sage. After explaining that in animals belonging to the same cla.s.s the parts are the same, differing only in excess or defect, he says, "But some animals agree with each other in their parts neither in form nor in excess and defect, but have only an a.n.a.logous likeness, such as a bone bears to a spine, a nail to a hoof, a hand to a crab's claw, the scale of a fish to the feather of a bird, for that which is a feather in the bird is a scale in the fish" (Cresswell, _loc. cit._, p. 2). One of these comparisons is, however, a h.o.m.ology not an a.n.a.logy, and the last phrase throws a little doubt upon the whole question, for it is not made clear whether it is position or function that determines what are equivalent organs.

In the _De Partibus Animalium_ there occurs the following pa.s.sage:--"Groups that only differ in degree, and in the more or less of an identical element that they possess, are aggregated under a single cla.s.s; groups whose attributes are not identical but a.n.a.logous are separated. For instance, bird differs from bird by gradation, or by excess and defect; some birds have long feathers, others short ones, but all are feathered. Bird and Fish are more remote and only agree in having a.n.a.logous organs; for what in the bird is feather, in the fish is scale. Such a.n.a.logies can scarcely, however, serve universally as indications for the formation of groups, for almost all animals present a.n.a.logies in their corresponding parts."[8] It is thus similarity in form and structure which determines the formation of the main groups. Within each group the parts differ only in degree, in largeness or smallness, softness and hardness, smoothness or roughness, and the like (_loc. cit._, i., 4, 644^b). These pa.s.sages show that Aristotle had some conception of h.o.m.ology as distinct from a.n.a.logy. He did not, however, develop the idea. What Aristotle sought in the variety of animal structure, and what he found, were not h.o.m.ologies, but rather communities of function, parts with the same attributes. His interest was all in _organs_, in functioning parts, not in the mere spatial relationship of parts.

This comes out clearly in his treatise _On the Parts of Animals_, which is subsequent to, and the complement of, his _History of Animals_. The latter is a description of the variety of animal form, the former is a treatise on the functions of the parts. He describes the plan of the _De Partibus Animalium_ as follows:--"We have, then, first to describe the common functions, common, that is, to the whole animal kingdom, or to certain large groups, or to members of a species. In other words, we have to describe the attributes common to all animals, or to a.s.semblages, like the cla.s.s of Birds, of closely allied groups differentiated by gradation, or to groups like Man not differentiated into subordinate groups. In the first case the common attributes may be called a.n.a.logous, in the second generic, in the third specific" (i, 5, 645^b, trans. Ogle). The alimentary ca.n.a.l is a good example of a part which is "a.n.a.logous" throughout the animal kingdom, for "all animals possess in common those parts by which they take in food, and into which they receive it" (Cresswell, _loc. cit._, p. 6).

The _De Partibus Animalium_ becomes in form a comparative organography, but the emphasis is always on function and community of function. Thus he treats of bone, "fish-spine," and cartilage together (_De Partibus_, ii., 9, 655^a), because they have the same function, though he says elsewhere that they are only a.n.a.logous structures (ii., 8, 653^b). In the same connection he describes also the supporting tissues of Invertebrates--the hard exoskeleton of Crustacea and Insects, the sh.e.l.l of Testacea, the "bone" of _Sepia_ (ii., 8, 654^a). Aristotle took much more interest in a.n.a.logies, in organs of similar function, than in h.o.m.ologies. He did recognise the existence of h.o.m.ologies, but rather _malgre lui_, because the facts forced it upon him.