Evolution / by Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson.

  • Patrick Geddes
Date:
[1911?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

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

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    logically akin; and this single and simple rhythm of metabolisms, of passivities and activities goes on into compound and re¬ compounding rhythms, like the figures of the pendulograph. The forms of life are thus distinct and definite, because harmoniously unified. They have a certain stability, great or small, yet they are anew transformable, like musical variations, like singing flames. Thus from within are spun and woven and shaped the manifold garments of Life, always simple, though ever more and more Protean. Our clue to the secret of variational evolution thus holds good, is one and the same from the ancient contrast of plant and animal up through the great lifts of evolution, and down through its ever recurrent falls; and if it applies equally to the origin of classes and orders, of genera and of species, why not also to the varieties and mutations which natural¬ ists are discussing, for the most part too externally, at the present day? Summary and Conclusions.—As in plants the species-maintaining functions prepon¬ derate over the individual ones, so that from annual to agave the plant must flower although it die, so the same preponderance appears in animals. The “ self-interest ” in which the utilitarian economists found the
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