Form and Function: A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology

Before Darwin rewrote biology, scientists spent two millennia debating why animals look the way they do. E.S. Russell's scholarly history traces this grand intellectual quest from Alcmaeon and Aristotle's first comparative observations through the great anatomists who puzzled over the same fundamental question: what is the relationship between an animal's structure and its purpose? Russell shows how each era approached form and function differently, sometimes emphasizing mechanical adaptation, sometimes recognizing deeper homologies that revealed evolutionary kinship. The book illuminates not just what scientists believed, but how they thought about living bodies across centuries of changing philosophical frameworks. For anyone curious about the intellectual origins of modern biology, this text offers a rigorous, detailed map of how we came to understand animal morphology.