PART II. 
THE APPLICATION TO MAN. 
Cuaracters oF Man—Hatr. 
I have now given some laws which seem to govern inheri- 
tance: I wish to apply them to Man. Just as I should take an 
Ammonite in hand to point out its ancestry from a study of 
its earlier whorls, and its posterity from observation of its later 
whorls, so would I take Man with the same intentions. There 
is, however, this difference—a very important difference. Man 
does not, like an Ammonite, furnish the record of his own ontog- 
eny. It is necessary to have specimens of all ages; and this 
introduces a danger—that the differences may be phyletic and 
not merely ontogenetic. 
To trace Man’s ancestry it is necessary to study the earlier 
stages of his life, because by the law of earlier inheritance they 
should be the morphological representations of adult ancestors 
of earlier periods—though there would be limitations as I have 
pointed out, (p. 268); to speculate on his future the later 
stages must be examined, because they are the morphological 
prefigurations of future adolescent, and other stages—in fact, 
what are senile stages to-day will in process of time be the 
adult stages presently, will become the adolescent stages of a 
more distant future, and the infantile stages of a very remote 
time to come—if the race last long enough. Natural selection 
may check but cannot stop this inevitable process. 
The human fetus, then, becomes the first matter for 
consideration ; but, as this is necessarily a subject beyond my 
experience, I can only refer the reader to Darwin’s remarks 
