80 The Recapitulation Theory and Human Infancy 



logical conception is unmistakable. One allusion among many 

 is the familiar one to the period of childhood from nine to eleven 

 years as representing "a terminal stage in human development 

 at some post-simian point. " This period is followed by adoles- 

 cence " which recapitulates the long pilgrimage of the soul from 

 its old level to a higher maturity which must have taken place 

 in the race in certain of its important lines long before the his- 

 torical period." 26 



Statements of the kind are legion. 27 Two others will serve 

 the present purpose. One is from the biologist Tyler, who says, 

 "The child is naturally successively animal, anthropoid, half- 

 barbarian, and then civilized." 28 The other is taken from the 

 literature of the "boy problem" which is fairly saturated with 

 the doctrine. "We are by turns vertebrates, gill-breathing 

 vertebrates, lung-breathing vertebrates (we make the great 

 change at birth), little monkeys, little savages, and finally 

 civilized men and women." 29 



It now becomes our object to examine briefly the facts of 

 human infantile recapitulation. It will be impossible to cite 

 every allusion of the kind, for these have been made casually 

 in the course of numerous papers on an indefinite number of 

 topics. The present intention is limited to a general charac- 

 terization of classes of cases and to probabilities in the light of 

 accepted principles of general genetic psychology. The degree 

 of ignorance still prevailing with respect to the course of individu- 

 al and racial psycho-genesis prohibits more than a preliminary 

 survey of the topic. 



In making this survey of the facts we have the advantage of 

 an hypothesis derived from the revision of the biological attitude 

 toward the ancestral facts of embryology, as summarized in the 

 preceding chapter, and illustrated further in the section on 

 human embryogeny. What is true of embryogeny may be true 

 of infancy. We may keep in mind the idea that the ancestral 

 life-history has been transmitted from generation to generation 

 as a whole, and that it has been altered with each step in descent 

 rather than extended. In keeping with this view infancy prob- 



"Vol. II, p. 73. 



27 See Thorndike, Original Nature of Man, 1913, pp. 249-252, for an interesting collec- 

 tion. 



2 8 Growth and Education, 1907, p. 53. 



Puffer, The Boy and his Gang, 1912, p. 77. 



