ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to review some of the contributions of James Keill, MD (1673–1719), who introduced geometric progression scaling laws in his morphometric works on the anatomy and physiology of arterial trees (Keill 1708, 1717, 1718, 1738). These scaling laws, based on a centrifugal, generational ordering system, are still used in biology (Weibel 1963). These laws assume, unrealistically, that there is a perfect symmetry of branch lengths and diameters at each generation.
