Murray Grigor's story about On Growth and Form

I was a puzzled science student in the early Sixties, because I was also interested in the arts, so D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form grabbed me by both lapels. Here was a book that explored the development of living things by breaching the boundaries between the sciences and arts in the spirit of the Scottish Enlightenment. ‘Who needs compartments,’ Hugh MacDiarmid would later ask, ‘unless your ship is sinking?’

My luck was that this book of revelations was backed up by the Bell Pettigrew Museum in St Andrews, which had then just been re-organised by David Burt, a long time assistant of D’Arcy Thompson. One afternoon this generous man spent an afternoon talking me through Thompson’s ingenious exhibits. Often the simplest device demonstrated the most complex notion. For example, by stretching the rear end of a skinny puffer fish, inscribed on a slab of rubber, its form could be ballooned out into the silhouette of plump mola mola. In Thompson’s book this was backed up by mathematical equations predating, by over 70 years, what can now be achieved through computer algorithms.

I soon learnt that D’Arcy Thompson’s way of forging links across disciplines, still continued to inspire artists and scientists to think outside the box. Salvador Dali and Eduardo Paolozzi revelled in the connections bridged by Thomson. It would soon inspire me as a film-maker, especially on my approach to architecture, for there are few architects or engineers who have not been influenced by this book. The engineer Ted Happold, whose most innovative designs derived from his study of natural forms, encouraged me to devote a whole exhibition On Growth and Form. Our dream was to bring together the work of scientists, engineers, artists and architects to reveal the genius of D’Arcy Thomson. Unfortunately such an enterprise was judged too esoteric as a crowd puller and a wonderful opportunity was lost. At least, with my late wife Barbara, we did some justice to the great polymath in the exhibitions we conceived for Glasgow 1990 and the Museum of Scotland. In that great bird cage hall in Edinburgh we contrasted a two storey engraving of the Forth Bridge cantilevers with a large model of a diplodocus. Thomson saw the inward sloping girders in compression as the dinosaur’s bones and the outward ones in tension as its ligaments, the very same forces which balanced the outstretched head of the diplodocus with the weight of its extended tail.

Whatever exigencies our present climate demands for trivial pursuit, On Growth and Form.is still available. Although now abridged, it has a telling foreword by Stephen Jay Gould, who had agreed to collaborate on our D’Arcy Thompson exhibition.

Above all D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form is the finest work in English literature ever written in the annals of science.