Arboreal Man

Abstract

EVER since anatomy became separated from physiology and practical medicine it has run the risk of being assimilated with the material with which it deals and itself becoming a “dead subject.” By a curious paradox this tendency became specially pronounced when the publication of “The Origin of Species” gave a great impetus to research in morphology, although Charles Darwin himself never failed to take into consideration the physiological and psychological factors which directly or indirectly affected the evolution of animal structure. But when the study of morphology led certain anatomists to regard their subject as what they were pleased to call a “pure science,” worthy of being cultivated “for its own sake,” and not merely as the geography of the territory the medical student would exploit when he became a physician or surgeon, an unfortunate tendency developed to disregard any treatment of the subject which might expose it unduly to the latter interpretation. As a result it suffered from the lack of those vitalising influences which the study of the functions naturally exerts upon attempts to explain structure.