On Growth and Form
by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
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Book Summary Information
Author: D'Arcy Wentworth ThompsonEditor: John Tyler Bonner
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1992-07-31
ISBN: 0521437768
Number of pages: 346
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Book Reviews of On Growth and Form
Book Review: an abridged version of this wondrous book is *also* a good thing
Summary: 5 Stars
I, too, am a longtime fan of D'Arcy Thompson's endearing (enduring) classic. I've read the discussion. I appreciate very much that Golan Levin, in "Canto: An unfortunate redaction of a timeless classic," and others as well, have made it clear to Amazon customers that the Canto (Cambridge University Press) version of this book is radically abridged, as compared to Dover's (apparently) unabridged edition. This kind of comparative information--about a book's being published under different editions, and what those editions contain--is the kind of crucial info which, as things stand, we customers have to contribute.
It's unfortunate, if understandable, that the bulk of the laudatory reviews here don't specify which edition these people read. Some of them appear to be from scientists and/or mathematicians: they are, perhaps, readers of the unabridged version. Viktor Blasjo's 5-star review *does* specify: he reports from the Dover unabridged, and a great report it is, too. He convinced me to pick up a copy.
Other reviewers seem to have come to D'Arcy Thompson from a more varied background, for their words remind me of my own experience: I first read this book at the age of 19, breathlessly turning the pages, filled to the brim with a sense of growing wonder about what science could do. In Thompson's hands, science opened up the secrets of Nature, right before my eyes. I'd read a fair amount of literature for my age, so from a more sophisticated angle, I relished the many passages of elegant writing--charmingly earnest, sometimes almost passionate. (Thompson's literary excellence comes in spurts, folks, so be patient.) "On Growth and Form" came, in time, to have a big influence on me: I'd been on the fence about science vs. literature for a major, and Thompson was the first in a series of dominoes that toppled me into a chemistry major, followed by medical school and becoming a doctor.
So what edition was this marvel of a book that I read? The abridged version, the 1961 edition, from the very same publisher (Cambridge University Press) and editor (John Tyler Bonner, PhD., Professor of Biology, Princeton University) to whom Levin and others have devoted so many unkind words.
I don't know, but I rather suspect, that at least a few of the other highly positive reviews have come from people who've had their experience of "On Growth and Form" with that very same abridged version. I did hear from someone in university publishing circles, in the '70s, that it was a surprising seller for such an odd little book.
Two of the other reviewers' comments, in particular, caught my attention:
"I have recommended it to home schoolers as the
best single book to inform a teenager about physics,
chemistry, biology, & practical thinking."
"This could be read by a junior or senior in high
school. But, I think it would be more appropriate
for college."
Can these people be talking about an 1100-page book? I'll grant any young person the ability to read anything, but the attention span, the sheer time it would take, to read 1100 pages... I just don't think they're talking about the unabridged version. One of the reasons Prof. Bonner gives for abridging the text, is to streamline the presentation of the ideas so as to keep the reader's attention. Is that *so* heretical? This is a master teacher talking here!
Oops--I got ahead of myself. Yes, Bonner was in fact *my* teacher. I had a real stroke of luck: John Tyler Bonner was my professor of Introductory Biology, freshman year. I savored his verbal brilliance in the lecture hall, and especially enjoyed getting to know his gentle, lively person, on various social occasions. His research was in slime molds--mind-boggling critters who change their form from a sheetlike syncytium to tall stalks like lollipops, then back again--an organism well-suited to the ideas of Thompson regarding stretching and shrinking of surfaces according to mathematically describable patterns.
I was an undergrad in the years 1973-77, by which time Professor Bonner's 1961 edit of D'Arcy Thompson's "On Growth and Form" was churning through multiple printings as an attractive, popular trade paperback. I knew lots of people who were reading it, or had it on their shelves. It was never assigned for any course (not even Prof. Bonner's Intro Biology), but somehow we all read it--science, poli-sci, history, English majors alike. But you don't have to go back to college with me to read at least some of what we read: Prof. Bonner's original 1961 introduction is in this Cambridge/Canto edition, plus his rousing 1992 follow-up. I haven't seen the book, so I don't know anything about the nature or extent of the re-edits in 1992, but Bonner does say a bit about them.
Just in case someone missed that: I do not know about the nature or extent of the 1992 re-edits. So I'm not speaking for the quality of this specific edition--just for the 1961 Cambridge/Canto abridged edition that I came to know and love so well. It seems to bode well, though, that Prof. Bonner is still at the helm.
More generally, though, I'm speaking for the notion that there's room for both, or many: a classic book is important enough to deserve more than one treatment. Look at all the editions of classic works of fiction: abridged, unabridged, children's version, illustrated #1, illustrated #2, comic book, annotated, revised w/ newly-discovered author's notes, corrected edition after original hand-written manuscript found in trunk buried on Treasure Island...
You can read Prof. Bonner's '61 introduction (which I think is lovely, but then I would) and his '92 follow-up on the new edition (he comments insightfully about the continuing relevance of Thompson's ideas to the past 30 years' advances in biology). You can also read the foreword by Stephen Jay Gould. (I'm surprised Amazon didn't get *his* name into the author field!) Just use the oh-so-helpful LOOK INSIDE! feature. To read the Intro, do a search on "Editor's", click the first hit, read & page forward as far as you can, then click the next instance of "Editor's", and so on. (You may have to improvise a bit to read the whole intro in order.) To read Gould's forward, just search on "Gould."
I strongly encourage those of you who are interested in this issue of page-lengths of different editions, degrees of reduction of the text, etc., to use LOOK INSIDE! and read what Bonner has to say on that point. Some of the reasons he gives for further shortening of the work are truly Thompsonian. =grin= And, thanks to Amazon, you can read those remarks just as you might've in a bookstore--while you're considering which edition to buy, or whether to buy both.
Enough. Enjoy. The more the merrier.
Oh--the five stars? Those are for the Platonic ideal of D'Arcy Thompson's "On Growth and Form."
Summary of On Growth and Form
Why do living things and physical phenomena take the form they do? D'Arcy Thompson's classic On Growth and Form looks at the way things grow and the shapes they take. Analysing biological processes in their mathematical and physical aspects, this historic work, first published in 1917, has also become renowned for the sheer poetry of its descriptions. A great scientist sensitive to the fascinations and beauty of the natural world tells of jumping fleas and slipper limpets; of buds and seeds; of bees' cells and rain drops; of the potter's thumb and the spider's web; of a film of soap and a bubble of oil; of a splash of a pebble in a pond. D'Arcy Thompson's writing, hailed as 'good literature as well as good science; a discourse on science as though it were a humanity', is now made available for a wider readership, with a foreword by one of today's great populisers of science, explaining the importance of the work for a new generation of readers.First published in 1917, On Growth and Form was at once revolutionary and conservative. Scottish embryologist D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860-1948) grew up in the newly cast shadow of Darwinism, and he took issue with some of the orthodoxies of the day--not because they were necessarily wrong, he said, but because they violated the spirit of Occam's razor, in which simple explanations are preferable to complex ones. In the case of such subjects as the growth of eggs, skeletons, and crystals, Thompson cited mathematical authority: these were matters of "economy and transformation," and they could be explained by laws governing surface tension and the like. (He doubtless would have enjoyed the study of fractals, which came after his time.) In On Growth and Form, he examines such matters as the curve of frequency or bell curve (which explains variations in height among 10-year-old schoolboys, the florets of a daisy, the distribution of darts on a cork board, the thickness of stripes along a zebra's flanks, the shape of mountain ranges and sand dunes) and spirals (which turn up everywhere in nature you look: in the curve of a seashell, the swirl of water boiling in a saucepan, the sweep of faraway nebulae, the twist of a strand of DNA, the turns of the labyrinth in which the legendary Minotaur lived out its days). The result is an astonishingly varied book that repays skimming and close reading alike. English biologist Sir Peter Medawar called Thompson's tome "beyond comparison the finest work of literature in all the annals of science that have been recorded in the English tongue." --Gregory McNamee
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