The Spiralists' Past

Leviathan Press:

It is entirely possible to imagine the excitement that an anatomist more than a hundred years ago felt when he observed the many spiral structures in his work and life - as if an eternal secret was revealed, and he was about to take a big step forward on behalf of mankind. From the concrete water vortex and petal arrangement to the abstract Tai Chi totem and even Junji Ito's metaphor of society in comics, the spiral has attracted the attention of countless people with its endless and mysterious line aesthetics. This is indeed wonderful: why do so many natural creations grow or move in such a regular and harmonious way? Why are spiral shells so similar in shape to galaxies and human hearts? Kevin Dann takes us into the vortex in the book Design in Nature (James Bell Pettigrew, 1908), depicting the prototype of the world - the spiral, and a forgotten exploration of it.

Plate XIX from Volume 1 of Design in Nature, showing the similarities between the spiral shell structure and the bones of the inner ear. © archive.org

On a quiet spring day in 1903, at the top of a sloping road on the outskirts of St Andrews, Scotland, sat 69-year-old anatomist and naturalist Dr James Bell Pettigrew, resting in a gasoline-powered aircraft of his own design.

Over the forty years since 1864, beginning with his aeronautical experiments in London, Pettigrew had built models of dozens of different flying devices.

Through dissection and observation of animals in the wild and at the London Zoo, he concluded that all living things—whether on land, in water, or in the air—propelled themselves into motion by throwing their bodies in spiral curves, similar to the waves of a liquid, or the waveform of sound.

Unlike other animal-like flying machines that used vertically driven wings, Pettigrew's "flapper" mimicked the motion of the flying creatures he had discovered: a rhythmic figure-eight curve. To create this wave-like motion, he installed a ball-and-socket joint at the base of the wing; the vibrating wing was made of bamboo cane, from which extended conical whalebones covered with a thin layer of natural India rubber, forming a cross-system of elastic forces that adjusted the way the wing vibrated. The pistons of a two-stroke engine drove the movement of this elaborate biological-mimicking spiral device.

Pettigrew with a version of his ornithopter; the woman is probably Elsie Belle Pettigrew (née Gray), philanthropist and founder of the Belle Pettigrew Museum of Natural Science, his wife. © The Royal Aeronautical Society/National Aerospace Library)/ Mary Evans Picture Library

The ornithopter flew 20 meters before crashing on its first flight, and then the whalebone wing broke off along with the pilot's butt. While recovering from his illness, Dr. Pettigrew began writing Design in Nature: Illustrated by Spiral and Other Arrangements in the Inorganic and Organic Kingdoms as Exemplified in Matter, Force, Life, Growth, Rhythms, &c., Especially in Crystals, Plants, and Animals.

In January 1908, the book was about to be completed. After a long article describing ancient humans, he emphasized again at the end that the human body shape has not changed for at least 10,000 years. This is an absolute "design" from the "great first cause" and "the omnipotent architect and maintainer of the universe." The following is his summary:

Man is not a product of evolution in any sense. It is impossible that countless lower animal forms merged in a process of constant change, and that man evolved from a single cell. Man is the highest form of living things. The world was made for him and he for the world… Everything has its counterpart. There is no accident or chance, everything is planned, foreseen, designed. Plate CLXXX from the third volume of Design in Nature illustrates the “diagonal spiral motion” that occurs during “walking, swimming and flying” through classical and modern sculptures. In numerical order: Jean-Léon Gérôme’s study of life; the goddess Venus of the ancient city of Ostia; the Greek boxer Damoxenus by Antonio Canova; and the bronze discus thrower. © archive.org Design in Nature consists of three volumes, 1,416 pages, and nearly 2,000 illustrations. In this magnum opus, Dr. James Bell Pettigrew barely mentions Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection because he considers it “crappy, stagnant, and incompetent.” Although Pettigrew deeply admires the English naturalist, Darwin (like Huxley, Richard Owen, John Lubbock, St. George Mivart, and dozens of other leading figures in science) visited Pettigrew several times at the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England to observe his pioneering preparations in anatomy and physiology.

He felt that Darwin had theoretically explained nature's "endless forms most beautiful," but he didn't seem to have high expectations - Darwinism was just a flash in the pan, and no one would remember it after a few generations.

What Pettigrew found particularly troubling was that Darwin had made serious errors in his published articles on the spiral motion of clematis, bindweed, honeysuckle, hops, and many other plants, undermining his positive contributions to the study of entangled plants by inaccurate language and thinking. Pettigrew objected strongly to his use of the word "reflex action" to describe the motion of these plants, because this word is used for the nervous system - something that clematis, bindweed, and their cousins ​​do not have.

As early as 1865, after reading Darwin's On the Motion and Habits of Climbing Plants, Pettigrew, through some clever experiments, completely shattered the "stimulus theory" of the movement of green chimeras in his book. Just like the spiral-shaped teeth, claws, horns, muscles and bones, the spiral rotation of plant tendrils is definitely not the result of contact with the external environment. Like the spiral eggshells laid by bull sharks and dog sharks in the ocean, the formation of this structure has nothing to do with external interference. They dance to invisible music.

Illustration from Darwin's On the Motion and Habits of Climbing Plants, with the "irritant theory" denounced by Pettigrew. © Wiki

Cucurbita tendrils under a magnifying glass. From Urformen der Kunst (Art Forms in Nature) by Karl Blossfeldt, 1928. © publicdomainreview.org

Pettigrew admits to being completely fascinated by the mysterious spiral, the most ubiquitous flowing and bizarre form in nature. From macroscopic spiral nebulae to microscopic left- and right-handed molecules in the periodic table, he has carefully studied this ubiquitous code, but he is still puzzled by its origin.

© Pinterest

The best he could say was that the answer was not on the surface. Confronted with the archetype of the world, the whorl, he was at a loss for what to do but was certain of one thing: it could not have originated in pure physics. In response to Pettigrew's series of articles on the cycles of plants and animals published in The Lancet, one critic called the distinguished anatomist a "spiralist," who believed that organs functioned in spirals as well as having spiral structures.

Design in Nature, Vol. 1, Plate XII, “Spiral Forms and Structures in Spermatozoa, Umbilical Cords, Intestinal Tracts, and Nerve Cells”. © archive.org He begins his argument with stunning photographs of cosmic nebulae, such as the Andromeda Galaxy, taken by Isaac Roberts in 1888, and then immerses the reader in a series of humble spiral forms—mineral chlorites, ram’s horns, bacteria in the Thames, fossilized algal cysts (the female reproductive organs of red algae), and the spiral arrangements of various plant leaves, buds, stems, tendrils, and even seeds.

The animal world begins with the sperm (crayfish, rabbit, field mouse, woodpecker, goldfinch, tit, perch, frog, mouse, and human), and then extends along the great chain of life: the frog's ganglia, various foraminifera, the delicate nautilus; various shells from the Devonian, Silurian, Jurassic, Cretaceous to the present; the horns of goats, gazelles, and antelopes; the human cochlea; from the toes of the Indian elephant to the human nasal concha, almost every part of the vertebrate skeleton; the human umbilical cord, which looks like a waterspout (translator's note: commonly known as "water dragon"), and like the simple, tall, spiraling hops, the winding stems of Darwin's research.

All of these are depicted in the first fifty pages of the book, with hundreds of other images scattered throughout the three volumes. This disorganized distribution can make it difficult for readers to understand the spiral's meaning.

Plate XVI from Volume I, "Spiral Structures in Shells, Horns, Tusks, Teeth, Feathers, Proboscis, Tentacles, etc." © archive.org

Plate XVII from Volume I, "Spiral structures in feathers and teeth, the arrangement of the muscles of the heart, and a cast of the ventricular cavity of the heart." © archive.org

Amid these dazzling images lies a sacred secret that has captured the hearts of Aristotle and Aquinas, Leonardo and Vesalius: the human heart.

The sevenfold helix in the heart is a mystery within a mystery, its form perfectly combining muscle contraction with the internal circulation pattern of blood. Young Pettigrew discovered this while a medical student at Edinburgh University, and after impressing his professors with his dissection, he was invited to speak at the famous Croonian Forum of the Royal Society of London in 1860.

During Pettigrew’s time as a medical student, the University of Edinburgh was in its golden age. James Syme astounded the world with his daring surgical interventions; James Young Simpson demonstrated the safety of chloroform as an obstetric anaesthetic to guests at his dining table at 52 Queen Street; John Hughes Bennett’s systematic use of the microscope ushered in a new era of clinical medical teaching; and Joseph Lister revolutionized surgery by using small amounts of carbolic acid (phenol) on wounds, bandages and instruments, which was initially ridiculed by his peers.

Pettigrew recalled the competition among these star doctors as being like “cutting diamonds with diamonds,” and the metaphor couldn’t be more apt. Cutting—with various scalpels, lancets, scissors—was the doctor’s special art. Pettigrew’s mentor in the art was anatomy professor John Goodsir, a man with large, powerful, finely shaped hands who wielded the scalpel with a deftness and grace that drew attention. At the end of the winter term of 1857-1858, Professor Goodsir announced the topic for the gold medal in advanced anatomy: the arrangement of muscle fibers in the ventricles of the vertebrate heart. This anatomical puzzle had frustrated Vesalius, Albinus, Haller, and everyone else who had attempted it for the previous three centuries.

Anatomical diagram from Pettigrew's paper on the arrangement of the mammalian cardiac nerves. © era.ed.ac.uk

At his family’s cottage in the Lanarkshire countryside, the 24-year-old Pettigrew tried to dissect every heart he could get his hands on, meticulously drawing and documenting them. From sheep, calves, bulls to horses, he realised he needed a new way to dissect, one that was both hard enough to preserve the anatomical structure but soft enough to tease out their many layers of tissue.

After consuming large quantities of methanol and other chemicals, he hit upon a stopgap measure: filling and gently dilating the ventricles with a real Scottish ingredient: dried oatmeal. Slow-cooking the heart for four or five hours removes all surface fat, blood vessels, nerves, lymphatic vessels, and cellular tissue. Then hardening it in methanol for two to three weeks allows the muscle fibers of the ventricles to be separated and peeled off layer by layer like onion skin. These layers are of two kinds: the outer muscle fibers of the heart that spiral from left to right and extend downward; and the inner fibers that spiral upward from right to left in the opposite direction.

Plate XCVII from Volume II of Design in Nature (1908), showing the twisting and internal spiraling fibres of the heart. © books.google.co.uk

He dissected more than 100 vertebrate hearts and found that the inner and outer layers of each muscle fiber formed two sets of opposite spirals that crossed each other, with the intersection tilted toward the center. These inner and outer layers were further divided into a pair of left-handed and right-handed spiral groups. In particular, the left ventricle had a most perfect symmetrical spiral, comparable to the Andromeda galaxy.

A gifted model maker, anatomist Pettigrew found the now double-helix heart a first-rate anatomical puzzle, since the outer muscle fibers were seamlessly and spirally continuous with the inner ones at the top and bottom of the ventricles. One day, he came downstairs to eat a little earlier than usual and saw a roll of newspaper on the table. He had a sudden impulse to roll it up diagonally from one corner—just as grocery stores wrap cones. Surprisingly, the printed lines on the stack of newspapers extended in different directions in a gradient sequence: the lines on the outer layer spiraled downward from left to right, becoming more inclined as they moved toward the center; the lines on the inner layer spiraled upward from right to left, becoming more vertical as they moved away from the center. As they approached the center, the printing on the two layers crossed at a widening angle, forming an X.

The printed lines at the top and bottom of the cone flowed seamlessly together, resembling the arrangement of the muscle fibers of the heart. It was a series of intricate figure-eight loops arranged in an extremely complex and beautiful mathematical pattern. “Here,” he wrote, “in short, there is a reading that turns in or involutes at the top and a reading that turns out or involutes at the bottom.” Pettigrew’s newspaper model revealed the heart’s double helix structure—now called the helical ventricular myocardial band (HVMB), which is essentially a triple-twisted Möbius strip.

Plate XCVIII from Design in Nature, Volume 2. © books.google.co.uk

Yelling “Eureka!”, Pettigrew raided fish shops in his native Lanarkshire, collecting the hearts of cod, salmon, sunfish, and halibut, and was lucky enough to get the heart of a shark killed in the Firth of Forth. He collected several exquisite turtle hearts from local restaurants, as well as a tortoise and a crocodile. He also visited poultry shops and obtained the hearts of ducks, geese, grouse, turkeys, and a “superb” swan heart.

From fish to frogs to turtles, the muscle fiber arrangements are interesting, but nothing can compare to the complex arrangement of the ventricles of birds and mammals (except for the right ventricle of the birds, which has a muscular valve that differs from the fibrous tricuspid valve of mammals, the pattern is exactly the same). Late at night, Pettigrew worked on the dissections of sheep, calves, bulls, horses, deer, pigs, porpoises, seals, lions, giraffes, camels, and humans in his simple student dormitory, a total of 112 dissections, and corresponding drawings.

When the day came for the gold medal, the name of this unknown was read out in the huge anatomical theater before more than 400 students. Professor Guthier asked Pettigrew to come to him the next day to prepare the heart for the university's anatomical museum. The 112 neatly arranged glass jars can still be found there today. He also invited young Pettigrew to report his findings to the Royal Society of London. In the same week that Pettigrew gave his lecture, "On the Arrangement of the Muscle Fibers in the Ventricles of the Vertebrate Heart," the publisher John Murray published The Origin of Species in Albemarle Street, not far from the Royal Society Hall. To attribute such an exquisite organ as the mammalian heart to chance, Pettigrew thought it was absolutely crazy.

The mammalian heart, the epitome of the spirals found in nature, was just one of three themes that Pettigrew would develop over the next half century. The second volume of Design in Nature was devoted to spiral motion in circulation (although this section covered the circulatory systems of plants and lower animals, mammals and humans still accounted for three-quarters of the study); the third volume dealt with the spiral as a formal property of motion.

In both areas of animal physiology, Pettigrew found a striking commonality: movement both preceded and followed structure, and in all cases the direction of motion was determined by the construction and configuration of dynamic spiral components. This commonality even seemed to extend all the way down to the atomic level. Unlike the closed system form of the heart, atoms and molecules in spiral form could be added in infinite numbers in infinite directions, and the open flow of energy and form was the basis for the growth and progress of all living things.

Illustration of an atom (which looks very much like a heart) from Edwin D. Babbitt's The Principle of Light and Color (1878). Note the positive and negative spirals. © archive.org

This openness also makes the movement of vertebrates very elegant. Pettigrew quoted his mentor Guthier as saying: "The human body can be thrown in a unique spiral posture, which is caused by the spiral curves of the spinal joint surfaces and the spiral arrangement of muscles. This spiral movement trajectory helps the human body to balance, and has a special elegance and expressiveness that is not applicable to other mammals."

The poetry of human movement could only be matched by birds – especially his favourites, the swallows and swifts, as they flew around the tower atop Swallowgate, a stone house he had built at St Andrews, and across the wide marshland leading to the nearby sea cliffs, their movements completely unleashed by less air resistance.

The unique spiral structure of humans on the ground frees their hands to sculpt clay, tie ropes, hold chalk, paintbrushes and scalpels to enter biological organs and depict them with colors and lines. The bone spiral hidden under the spiral muscles can bend and stretch, allowing them to jump, crawl, twist, roll, slide, march, somersault, and moonwalk. Humans dance in a nearly infinite vortex of their bodies, polka, pirouette, Scottish dance, waltz, two-step...

In Pettigrew’s third argument, he again started with structure—the intimate connection between the muscular and skeletal systems. Skeletal plates show that every part of our skeleton contains the same spiral geometry that Pettigrew had discovered in the heart. In the clavicle, pelvis, and scapula, the twisted femur, humerus, tibia, fibula, ulna, and radius are completely spiral—each one approximating the geometry of a Möbius strip.

Plate from the first volume of Design in Nature (1908), illustrating "the spiral formation of the human skeleton in the arms, legs, spine, clavicle, shoulder blade and pelvis." © archive.org

Design in Nature was published after Pettigrew’s death, a few months before the centenary of Darwin’s birth and the fiftieth anniversary of On the Origin of Species. Darwinists took full advantage of the celebrations to promote the image of Darwin as a fervent opponent of teleology. This caused Design in Nature to disappear from public view as quickly as Pettigrew’s ornithopter crashed over St. Andrews Moor.

Nature magazine attacked the book’s teleology in a full-page article, saying that if Pettigrew had lived to finish editing it, he would have “deleted or revised its conclusions.” Biostatistician Raymond Pearl was less gracious, declaring “this massive volume” “perhaps the largest and most serious contribution to the humorous literature in recent years” and accusing Pettigrew of “spiral philosophy”—“the idea that a creator fashioned humans and corkscrews on the same plan is as medieval as all cathedrals.”

No contemporary author of biology or natural history, including D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, who wrote about spirals in On Growth and Form (1917), has ever cited Design in Nature. Yet a century after its publication, Design in Nature stands as not only an unrivalled survey of biological form but also a provocative modern exploration of the forms of causation. It is also a phenomenological masterpiece whose vivid prose and gorgeous illustrations are likely to inspire a new generation of "spiralists".

By Dr Kevin Dann

Translation/Big Guy

Proofreading/Kublai

Original text/publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-spiralist

This article is based on the Creative Commons License (BY-NC) and is published by Da Guy on Leviathan

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