As one ascends the informational echelons – from Quentin Crisp to Aristotle; Milligan to Kant; Warhol to Pythagoras; bantam weight for light-heavy – to discover a book that has more than a dozen heroic hypotheses is a valid EVENT. D’Arcy Thompson’s ‘On Growth and Form’ is one such item, party packed with phenominal facts and hilarious minutiae on divers elememts of evolutional theory; cold cosmology; teleology; Cartesian mapping; biological positivism; the meaning of life? Following my own directive: ‘Don’t read people’s opinions on thinkers; read the thinkers’  I’ve compiled a short list of his principal pieces, ones that tickled my fancy:

o Froude’s Law: the bigger, the faster.

o Fish weigh the same per length of body – a 6” whale has the same mass as a 6” wrasse – as a 15 metre trout would a great white shark.

o There is a less than 2mm diameter difference between the smallest and largest dog’s eye.

o A human immersed in water will carry 2 fl oz of water on exit – a fly dipped in water doubles in weight. So who devised this esoteric experiment? Who performed it? And, why?

o Bergman’s Rule on ecogeographical heat convection: the colder the bigger.

o Surface tension in liquid is caused by outer molecules being drawn to the centre by the mass inside, thus contracting the surface until it reaches a ‘minimal area’ which explains why liquids form circular drops.

o Joseph Plateau, the soap bubble guy, described six surfaces of revolution: plane, sphere, cylinder, catenoid, unduloid, nodoid.

o Cell combinations are most stable in ‘polar furrow’ or tetracitular shapings.

o Massed circles of equal size always touch on six points. When these have elastic edges and are pushed together they will turn into rows of hexagons. Which is why honeycomb is thusly shaped – has nothing to do with the bees’ intelligence – is merely the optimal storage space.

o Warren’s Truss; is the strongest support – as found in the wing bone structure of birds.

o Durer’s ‘Treatise on Proportion’ – of Cartesian coordinates – also applies to Aristotle’s lagoon crustaceans?

o Horn, bone, shell, tooth, claw – are accumulated material deposited by cell growth and always retain trigonometric conformation.

o The logarithmic or equiangular spiral is a flattened cone seen from above – first measured by René Descartes in 1638.

o Mountain goat horns weighing over 60 lbs are easily lifted with two fingers in the skull such is their perfect equipoisal balance.

o The Narwhals’ horn is alone in nature by being completely STRAIGHT as when growing (without gravity) all resistant forces are counter-balanced.

o Topological similitude; depicting skeletal transformation through Cartesian graphics – often in logarithmic, curvilinear order – as in man to dog, or horse to rabbit.

  Geothe’s term; ‘Morphology’, for the taxonomic proportions seen above. As Galileo quoted Pythagoras, ‘the book of Nature is written in the characters of Geometry.’ To weigh and measure of time, space and mass; numerical precision is the SOUL of science. Natural History contains truths remote from causation; the ephemeral, the accidental, not eternal nor universal; organic efficiency not teleology; means over ends; pure mechanics; form is a diagram of forces; the fabric of the body; stereo-chemistry; gravity v osmosis in cell division; that life cannot ACT as matter but only as the seat of energy and a centre of force.

  If you’re enthralled by order of shapes and patterns as infrastructural, as I have been throughout my life, I recommend you read this book.