ABSTRACT
There is of course a considerable change in the proportions of the parts of the body between birth and old age,c but the traditional Chinese methods do not seem to have taken account of this. If they had, they would have been even more directly ancestral to d'Arcy Thompson's famous theory of morphological transformations,d and the classical work of Julian Huxley on unequal growth rates in animals.e For what they envisaged was the regular expansion of a co-ordinate system with increasing age, female bodies reaching their maxima at a lower stature than male ones; and this was surely the first step on the way to visualisation of co-ordinate distortions as relating different species of animals, and different ages of the same animal species.
