Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 16, 2025
Thanks to the intimate alliance of morphology with medicine, the natural history of disease has, at the present day, attained a high degree of perfection.
All the important results of comparative morphology and physiology, which the modern supporters of the doctrine of descent so confidently utilise as arguments in its favour, would have been welcomed by those who held the original and general evolution idea, as a corroboration of their own standpoint.
Gentlemen, just bridge one gulf for us; the gulf lying between any two species will do. We get impatient, standing and gazing. Look! Can you see across? Mr. Darwin says, "Professor Haeckel, in his general Morphology and other works, has brought his great knowledge and abilities to bear on what he calls phylogeny or the lines of descent of all organic beings." Origin of Species, p. 381.
Turning now to the great steps in that progress which the biological sciences have made since 1837, we are met, on the threshold of our epoch, with perhaps the greatest of all namely, the promulgation by Schwann, in 1839, of the generalisation known as the 'cell theory, the application and extension of which by a host of subsequent investigators has revolutionised morphology, development, and physiology.
On this same view of descent with modification, all the great facts in Morphology become intelligible, whether we look to the same pattern displayed in the homologous organs, to whatever purpose applied, of the different species of a class; or to the homologous parts constructed on the same pattern in each individual animal and plant.
Consider, now, where our inquiries have led us. We studied our type morphologically, when we determined its anatomy and its development, and when comparing it, in these respects, with other animals, we made out its place in a system of classification. If we were to examine every animal in a similar manner, we should establish a complete body of zoological morphology.
Morphology and distribution might be studied almost as well, if animals and plants were a peculiar kind of crystals, and possessed none of those functions which distinguish living beings so remarkably. But the facts of morphology and distribution have to be accounted for, and the science, whose aim it is to account for them, is Physiology. Let us return to our lobster once more.
As an indication of the possible combinations which may be made by those who are studying for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, the following schedule is presented: Physics, Mathematics, and Chemistry; Animal Physiology, Animal Morphology, and Chemistry; Chemistry, Mineralogy, and Geology; Mathematics, Astronomy, and Physics; Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin; History, Political Economy, and International Law; Greek, Sanskrit, and Latin; French, Italian and Spanish, and German; Latin, Sanskrit, and Roman Law; Latin, Sanskrit, and German; Assyriology, Ethiopic and Arabic, and Greek; Political Economy, History, and Administration; English, German, and Old Norse; Inorganic Geology and Petrography, Mineralogy, and Chemistry; Geology and Mineralogy, Chemistry, and Physics; Romance Languages, German, and English; Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit; German, English, and Sanskrit.
So, in the same way, the man of science replies to objections of this kind, by simply getting up and walking onward, and showing what science has done and is doing -by pointing to that immense mass of facts which have been ascertained as systematised under the forms of the great doctrines of morphology, of development, of distribution, and the like.
In so far as it comprises the surface configuration and the inner structure of the earth, it answers to morphology; in so far as it studies changes of condition and their causes, it corresponds with physiology; in so far as it deals with the causes which have effected the progress of the earth from its earliest to its present state, it forms part of the general doctrine of evolution.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking