

CHAPTER IV 



CONCLUSION 



The history of recapitulation is an instructive one. A prin- 

 ciple of limited application within the field of its origin was 

 elevated to a position of wide generality, and so gave rise to a 

 conception in the main misleading. Carried into a new terri- 

 tory without a sufficient examination of its merits, it was ap- 

 plied broadly as an explanatory principle and thus distributed 

 its misleading influence beyond its own borders. 



Disregarding the qualifications which were forced upon it by 

 recalcitrant facts, the conception represented a view of individual 

 development as successively extended in the course of evolu- 

 tion, in such fashion that in any ontogeny the earliest features 

 are oldest, the later ones in succession increasingly recent. Thus 

 embryogeny as a period was oldest, infancy less old, and matur- 

 ity the last to evolve. From this form the conception degener- 

 ated to a less and less chronological notion, until it came to mean 

 often no more than that any particular feature in development 

 which had an historical rather than a present reference was 

 illustrative of it. 



A more thorough consideration of the facts has led to a view 

 of development essentially contradictory of this recapitulatory 

 one. Ontogeny represents the ancient life-cycle which as such 

 has been transmitted from the beginning. The chronological 

 sequence from egg to maturity is not a rehearsal of a like his- 

 torical series of events throughout the phylogeny of species; it 

 is but the recurrence of an order which has been repeated in the 

 lifetime of each individual from the beginning. In general, the 

 effect of the modifications induced by germinal mutations and 

 selection in the successive ontogenies constituting the phylo- 

 geny, was to alter these ontogenies, to make them over, and to 

 destroy the resemblance of later ones to their predecessors. 



Still this alteration was not complete; neither was it regular 

 in its effects. Some very ancient forms are still hinted at in 



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