THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE CYCLE 167 



most part to the good. It cannot be maintained with- 

 out grotesqueness that the efforts to reduce infantile 

 mortality should be abandoned because they imply an 

 interference with natural selection. This position is 

 grotesque not only because Man has been interfering 

 with natural selection ever since civihsation began, 

 not only because natural selection cannot be trusted 

 to work in the right direction when the conditions 

 of its operation are of Man's making, but mainly be- 

 cause a great part of the mortality is not discriminating 

 at all and is quite avoidable. In a huge number of 

 cases it is merely thinning, not sifting, that goes on. 

 Moreover, while there is a right place for preaching 

 repentance and *less coddling,' it is not in regard to 

 infants. And finally the advocates of the policy of 

 ' Thorough ' would do well to remember, for instance, 

 how much the modern world owes to one who is said 

 to have been about the miserablest infant ever seen 

 — Isaac Newton to wit. 



§4. The Individual's Recapitulation of Racial 

 Evolution 



Many forms of hfe show in the early stages of their 

 life-history, and especially in the building-up of their 

 organs, a tendency to repeat in condensed form what 

 we believe to have been great steps in the evolution 

 of the race to which they belong. This is called re- 

 capitulation. As Professor Milnes Marshall put it, the 

 creature may be said to climb up its own genealogical 

 tree. The individual development tends to be a con- 



