802 The American Naturalist. [September, 
GENERAL PHYSIOLOGY AND ITS RELATION TO 
MORPHOLOGY.’ 
By C. O. WHITMAN. 
It is only as a zoologist that I venture to discuss this subject ; 
and only in this capacity that I undertake to defend the prop- 
osition, that general zoological physiology is the promising field 
in which morphology and physiology may work most profita- 
bly together. 
Morphology and physiology are two quite distinct sides ‘of 
biology, each with definite and constant peculiarities of 
method and aim; but these two sides are only the statical 
and the dynamical aspect of one and the same thing; one 
presents the feature, the other the expression. It is only as a 
matter of convenience that these two aspects are dealt with 
separately ; they are complemental, and have their full mean- 
ing only when united. The same function may appear in 
different forms, but a knowledge of the forms is nevertheless 
indispensable to an understanding of the function, and, con- 
versely, the function must be known before we can arrive at a 
complete interpretation of the form. The best interests of 
biology demand that morphology and physiology should be 
kept in working contact. That is the lesson of the hour, 
which thoughtful investigators on both sides are coming more 
and more to realize. ‘The separation of these two great 
branches of biology has been carried to an extreme that 
impedes the progress of both—an extreme that is unnatural 
and that has resulted from keeping physiology too exclusively 
in the service of medicine. 
- Physiology has come to mean, in practice at least, little 
more than the science which treats of the functions of fully 
developed organs. That this is an important side of physiol- 
ogy goes without saying, but there is another side no less 
important, which has been hitherto left almost wholly to mor- 
1From the Fifth Annual Report on the Marine Biological Laboratory of Wood’s 
. Holl, 1892. 
