Man has long been fascinated by how birds fly and fish swim. But the mechanics of animal anatomy remained a puzzle from the days of Solomon (whose wisdom, so the Bible says, was defeated by "the way of the eagle in the air"). In the Thirties James Gray began to make a serious study of animal locomotion
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Gray's breakthrough was to combine the then separate disciplines of biology and mechanics. He studied animals as machines, believing - as he explained in this speech as president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1959 - that man had a lot to learn from them
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With his work on fish, Gray opened a new field of research: animal locomotion. He stimulated many further studies, on large mammals, insects, invertebrates and birds. When scientists began to look at animals as mechanical constructions, many formerly inexplicable details of their anatomies suddenly made sense
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to come
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Gray was a rather reluctant champion in the field of animal mechanics, to which he devoted almost 40 years of his life. His primary interest lay in cell biology, and he returned to that subject after the publication of his book, Animal Locomotion
