712 ON FORM AND MECHANICAL EFFICIENCY [ch. 



whatever its ultimate expression or explanation may come to be. 

 Let us not press either argument or hypothesis too far: but be 

 content to see that skeletal form, as brought about by growth, 

 is to a very large extent determined by mechanical considerations, 

 and tends to manifest itself as a diagram, or reflected image, of 

 mechanical stress. If we fail, owing to the immense complexity 

 of the case, to unravel all the mathematical principles involved 

 in the construction of the skeleton, we yet gain something, and 

 not a little, by applying this method to the familiar objects of our 

 anatomical study: obvia conspicimus, nubem pellente mathesi*. 



Before we leave this subject of mechanical adaptation, let us 

 dwell once more for a moment upon the considerations which 

 arise from our conception of a field of force, or field of stress, in 

 which tension and compression (for instance) are inevitably 

 combined, and are met by the materials naturally fitted to resist 

 them. It has been remarked over and over again how harmoni- 

 ously the whole organism hangs together, and how throughout 

 its fabric one part is related and fitted to another in strictly 

 functional correlation. But this conception, though never denied, 

 is sometimes apt to be forgotten in the course of that process of 

 more and more minute analysis by which, for simplicity's sake, 

 we seek to unravel the intricacies of a complex organism. 



We tend, as we analyse a thing into its parts or into its 

 properties, to magnify these, to exaggerate their apparent 

 independence, and to hide from ourselves (at least for a time) the 

 essential integrity and individuality of the composite whole. We 

 divide the body into its organs, the skeleton into its bones, as 

 in very much the same fashion we make a subjective analysis of 

 the mind, according to the teachings of psychology, into component 

 factors: but we know very well that judgment and knowledge, 

 courage or gentleness, love or fear, have no separate existence, 

 but are somehow mere manifestations, or imaginary co-efficients, 

 of a most complex integral. And likewise, as biologists, we may 

 go so far as to say that even the bones themselves are only in a 

 limited and even a deceptive sense, separate and individual 

 things. The skeleton begins as a continuum, and a continuum it 

 remains all life long. The things that link bone with bone, 



* The motto was Macquorn Rankine's. 



