Post by Stephen Nowlin

Stephen Nowlin "Marginalia: Knowledge Works/D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson," 2026. Scanned mixed media, archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper   Book Title Page: “On Growth and Form,” 1917. By D’Arcy Wentwoth Thompson, (1860 – 1948).   Cambridge: at the University Press, 1917. Book source: The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.   D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson was a Scottish biologist, mathematician and classics scholar. He was a pioneer of mathematical and theoretical biology, and Professor of Natural History at University College, Dundee for 32 years. He was the author of the 1917 book "On Growth and Form," which led the way for the scientific explanation of morphogenesis, the process by which patterns and body structures are formed in plants and animals. He originated the description of form in nature, as a "diagram of forces."   --------------------------   Because the Knowledge Works series' books are old (17th to early 20th centuries) and rare and often buried in library collections, they’re not readily accessible nor their content widely recognized as still resonant in the present. Theirs was an era of burgeoning new scientific awareness and a creeping realization that prior knowledge of the world and ourselves might only have been a placeholder -- that some of the past's eternal absolutes were only seemingly so and might crumble. Their voices speak from a time before the 300 years of discovery we now look upon. Yet resurrected they speak from their time as if to our own.