SECT. 3] AND ORGANISATION 555 



raised by the notion of an external designer. The problem, as far 

 as I can see, is extra-scientific and quite insoluble." 



There is a sense, however, in which Cunningham's question has 

 a meaning for science, and all that can be said, in answer to it is 

 that the exact biologist has a hope, a belief, that in the long run 

 the outward forms and shapes of living animals are as much de- 

 pendent on the properties of what we call matter, as anything else 

 about them. To object that this is to endow atoms and electrons with 

 occult properties and potentialities is not reasonable, for the only 

 alternative is to abandon all hope of bringing form and shape within 

 the coherent scheme of the scientific world-picture. We cannot resign 

 ourselves to leaving them out in this way, and there is the less cause 

 for despondency when we see what great progress has been made 

 along such lines of research as that pursued by d'Arcy Thompson 

 and summarised in his Growth and Form. 



Nevertheless there are real difficulties in this subject, and J. H. 

 Woodger, who has acutely felt them, has even gone so far as to 

 maintain that biology may for ever consist of two irreconcilable 

 divisions, morphology and physiology. Experimental and causal 

 embryology, in his view, is only physiology disguised. He would 

 regard morphological description as an end in itself, and the ultimate 

 aim of the morphologist to come down to solid geometry instead of 

 to causal relationships. There may be in this view an element of 

 truth, but in so far as any morphologist holds such an opinion of 

 his goal he must admit himself to be an artist searching for the 

 aesthetic experience of significant form rather than a scientific in- 

 vestigator seeking for understanding of how the thing works — surely 

 the essence of scientific explanation. 



Another thinker who has vigorously opposed the extension of 

 physico-chemical concepts to include morphology is E. Rignano. 

 In a discussion of the relations of biochemistry with embryology he 

 said, "Now what do the ultra-mechanists do in the presence of these 

 teleological manifestations of the generative and regenerative pro- 

 cesses? They direct all their efforts to an attempt to prove that 

 given chemical substances exercise a morphogenetic action on par- 

 ticular developments, hoping to conclude triumphantly that the 

 entire series of morphogenetic phenomena, constituting the onto- 

 genetic development, may be explained completely by physico- 

 chemical action. But in this attempt they have mistaken a mere 



