failure had confirmed the central importance of the form-function relation. There could, after all, be no functional failure if the relation between form and function were not powerful. The call should then follow for a new theory of function. Instead, there was an abandonment of functional theory in general, and an intellectual abandonment of the form-function problem at exactly the moment when functional failure had brought it dramatically to public attention. To understand this apparently perverse reaction and also see that it was in a certain sense justified we must understand exactly what it was that was rejected.