On the other, Thompson’s rigorous adherence to mathematical law proffered a timely riposte to the mysticism that had begun creeping into early twentieth-century biology. On the one hand, his thesis presented evolution in novel terms, as a sudden and mercurial force, rather than (as was traditionally contended by Charles Darwin and his nineteenth-century disciples) something slow and steady. 10 Thompson’s book was heralded by scientists as making a substantial contribution to the field of experimental morphology. 9 A scholar of natural history, Thompson steadfastly believed that the laws of mathematics could be used to explain the principles of growth and form in living matter and spent many years developing a theory to elucidate how every biological object was effectively a ‘diagram of forces’, shaped in time and space by quantifiable physical energies. Here Moore’s familiarity with biology is evinced by the way in which the Transformation Drawings subtly echo the principles of organic form laid out in D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s morphological masterpiece, On Growth and Form (1917).
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