176 ORGANIC FORMS VIEWED BY 



Brewster's keen vision directed to his special work 

 enabled him first to see the ultra red portion of the 

 spectrum, and to see it better than any other person ; 

 in both instances it may be inferred that the optical 

 sense could be extolled or heightened by force of will 

 when the mind was intent on " light, more light." 



A close scrutiny of the structure of organised 

 forms, and a rigid comparison of the forms themselves, 

 led Goodsir to the theory of a triangle as the mathe- 

 matical figure upon which Nature had built up both 

 the organic and inorganic worlds. The fundamental 

 principle of form, he seemed to think, lay within the 

 province of crystallography, and was to be discovered 

 by a close study of the laws of that science. The first 

 expression of his belief was in the museum in 1865, 

 when, holding out his hand and bending the phalanges 

 of his thumb towards the palm, thereby producing 

 certain angles, he said to Mr. Stirling, " There is the 

 triangle, the basis of organic forms."* He had his hand 

 triangled, and this member he found to correspond 

 with the angles taken from the head and shoulders, 

 and other parts of his body. He considered that 

 every organism could be enclosed in a figure of a 

 precise and characteristic form, which he compared 

 with a crystal, and that each part of an organism also 



* It is essential to state that Goodsir left no MS. as a guidance to his 

 ultimate views of the triangle, and that this chapter, as far as it attempts an 

 elucidation of his theory, is based on the recollections of conversation with 

 the professor ; and is mainly derived from his family and Mr. Stirling, his 

 museum assistant, who for months laboured to carry out by various dissections 

 and plans his master's triangle-hypothesis. 



