Ontogenie Agencies 91 



i. Ontogenie Agencies 



Ontogeny. - - The series of facts which investigation in 

 this field has to deal with are those of the individual 

 creature's development, and two sorts of facts may be 

 distinguished from the point of view of ths functions which 

 an organism performs in the course of its life history. 

 There is, in the first place, the development of his 

 hereditary impulse, the unfolding of its heredity in the 

 forms and functions which characterize its kind, together 

 with the congenital variations which characterize the par- 

 ticular individual the variations peculiar and constitu- 

 tional to him and there is, in the second place, the series 

 of functions, acts, etc., ivJiicli he learns for Jiimself in the 

 course of his life. All of these latter, the special modifica- 

 tions which an organism undergoes during its ontogeny, 

 thrown together, have been called 'acquired characters,' 

 and we may use that expression or adopt one recently 

 suggested by Osborn, 1 ' ontogenic variations ' (except that 

 I should prefer the form 'ontogenetic variations') if the 

 word 'variations' seems appropriate at all. 2 



Assuming that there are such new or modified functions, 

 in the first instance, and such ' acquired characters ' aris- 



1 Reported in Science, April 3 ; also used by him before the New York 

 Academy of Science, April 13. There is some confusion between the two 

 terminations, 'genie' and 'genetic.' I think the proper distinction is that 

 which reserves the former, ' genie,' for application in cases in which the word 

 to which it is affixed qualifies a term used actively, while the other, ' genetic,' 

 conveys similarly a passive signification; thus agencies, causes, influences, 

 etc., are 'ontogenic, phylogenic, etc.,' while effects, consequences, etc., are 

 ' ontogenetic, phylogenetic, etc.' On terminology, see, however, the short 

 paper reprinted below as Chap. XI. i. 



2 As it does not. The term modification, used above, is also given this mean- 

 ing by Lloyd Morgan {Habit and Instinct, 1897) an< ^ * s now widely adopted. 



