Human Infancy and the Recapitulation Theory 81 



ably has had its own evolution, having been evolved when it 

 was needed, and having been altered from age to age from germi- 

 nal mutation, and by selection as the necessities of its circumstan- 

 ces required. We should expect to find in infancy a compara- 

 tively small number of traits having an ancestral reference merely. 

 These traits would be scattered and not related in a chronolog- 

 ical sequence suggestive of phyletic recapitulation, and their 

 ancestral reference would be first to ancestral infancies and only 

 indirectly to adult characters for which the infantile condition 

 was preparing. Some ancestral traits would perhaps have been 

 made over in part to meet new conditions, and there would 

 likely be an insignificant number of useless rudiments. 



The most important group of facts adduced in favor of mental 

 recapitulation are those referring to a savage human condition, 

 as illustrated in the behavior of lower living races of men. 30 

 These include a large number of instinctive tendencies, especially 

 among boys, which are characteristically savage. Some of these 

 are the love of games embodying running, dodging, throwing, 

 hitting with a club, wrestling, boxing; a strong interest in ad- 

 venturous undertakings, fishing, swimming, exploits requiring 

 endurance, courage, self-control, daring; outdoor interests in row- 

 ing, sailing, climbing, exploring, the handling of animals, hunt- 

 ing; the instinctive grouping in "gangs," group undertakings, 

 hero-worship, group loyalty, antipathy for outsiders, fighting, 

 with all its savage excesses, predatory excursions. The facts 

 are too familiar to require further illustration. 



But this whole group of cases cannot be regarded as ancestral 

 or in any sense recapitulatory; in fact it points quite the other 

 way. The living races of men, to whose modes of life these 

 examples all refer, belong to one species. The older view of 

 Spencer, Galton, Fiske, and others, which held for an organic 

 difference between savage and civilized human nature, has 

 been supplanted by a conception of the essential identity in the 

 hereditary make-up of all races regardless of the degree of civili- 

 zation. 31 



The differences between civilized and savage men are chiefly, 

 if not wholly, acquired and are due to the unlike exploitation of 



3 <> See Chamberlain, The Child, Chap. VIII, and Swift, Mind in the Making, Chap. 

 II, for convenient summaries. 



See Boas, Mind of Primitive Man; also, Thomas, Source Book for Social Origins., 

 Part II, and bibliographies. 



