THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE CYCLE 169 



things, a crust for the cutting teeth, paper and chalks 

 for the child-artist, a doll for the child-mother, a garden- 

 plot for one, a mechano for another, a problem for Jack 

 and a poem for Jill, and so on without end. Perhaps the 

 biologist may be permitted to say that the Hberating 

 stimuli suppHed in school should avoid three extremes. 

 They should not be too grown-up, lor that means un- 

 natural coercion. They should not be too sophisticated 

 and modern, for then they lose reahty, missing the primal 

 interests. They should not be too primitive, for we 

 cannot go back to the simple life ; we live in condi- 

 tions to which our engrained predispositions and our 

 instincts are far from being altogether well fitted. 



The zoological evidence of recapitulation refers chiefly 

 to embryonic development — to the making of organs, 

 and it seems incontestable that the young creature 

 often proceeds from stage to stage in a strange circuitous 

 fashion, which we cannot explain except on the theory 

 that because of its enregistered inheritance, due to many 

 steps taken in many successive ages, it has to follow 

 the trail blazed out by distant ancestors. Though it is 

 nonsense to speak of a fish-like stage in the development 

 of man, even man has gill-clefts like a dogfish. None of 

 them is of any use for breathing, and only one is of any 

 use at all, the one that becomes what is called the 

 Eustachian tube. Yet they are telltale recapitulations 

 of a very distant aquatic ancestry. The recapitulation 

 can only be general, for great steps that may have 

 taken the race hundreds of thousands of years are con- 

 densed in the individual into a few days. Moreover^ 



