Biotechnics : the practice of synthesis in the work of Patrick Geddes

had one meeting with Darwin. During this time, we learn, Geddes made his discovery of the presence of chlorophyl in some of the lowest animal species. He over-worked, and was sent to Britanny, where he was inspired by the Marine Biology Station at Roscoff. Through Huxley he had thus become introduced to French life and thought (Geddes regarded this as ‘an inestimable service’), which was of permanent influence on his work. He moved to the Sorbonne in Paris—this being at least the fourth of the universities with which he was connected. Later, with his best pupil J. Arthur Thomson, he was to continue his contributions to biology in the authoritative works on “The Evolution of Sex’ first published in the U.S.A. and ‘Life—Outlines of Biology’; and himself to write biological articles for the great encyclopaedias.

After a succession of University connections from none of which did he obtain a degree, he held a lectureship at Edinburgh for nine years, and it was as a Professor of Botany that he had his one senior academic post. Apart from the extraordinary phenomenon of a professor without a degree, this appointment at University College, Dundee, (part of the University of St. Andrews) quite near his childhood home of Perth, was also remarkably enlightened and fortunate, since he had to be there only in the summer term. That post he held for thirty years. It is perhaps not quite so surprising that he got it, if we consider that his application was a pamphlet of 100 pages listing his publications and experience and supported by a small army of academics including Darwin. There are many fascinating details about all this, which can be read in the books about Geddes, and his farewell lecture in 1919—‘Biology and its Social Bearings: How a Botanist looks at the World’—has been reprinted and should be read and re-read as a classic statement of the organic way of thinking about human problems. It is difficult to resist quoting from it at great length. Perhaps these extracts, even as abbreviated, will give some small idea of its maturity of thought.

‘To begin with botanists, even at their dryest and worst, they were more reasonable than they seemed, and more practical also, for “all knowing is classifying”.

‘The herbarium of Linaeus—of dried plants, well arranged and labelled—and his System of Nature is the first great landmark

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