THE RECAPITULATION OF THE EVOLUTION 27 



presents the appearance of an ordinary human being. But mani- 

 festly the additions and subtractions have been vast. It possesses, 

 for instance, a placenta, an organ by which it is attached to the 

 mother, through which it is nourished, and which at one time is 

 larger than the embryo itself; but which, of course, could not have 

 been present in its prototypes. On the other hand, the prototypes 

 were capable of maintaining an independent existence by means 

 of functionally active organs, which the embryo, fitted as it is only 

 for a passive parasitic life within the uterus, has lost or almost 

 lost. Nevertheless the life-history unfolded by the child is just as 

 real, just as complete, and probably more accurate than any written 

 chronicle that attempts to describe the whole past of a race. 



" There is a history in all men's lives 

 Figuring the nature of the times deceased." 



50. The history is not told in words, but in graphic signs, in 

 mimicry. It was begun by the first multicellular ancestor, and 

 then consisted of a single word or sentence, a single cell-division. 

 Each succeeding generation copied it, and many generations added 

 sentences. But the copying was never exact. Therefore, as the 

 history lengthened it became legendary and even mythical in its 

 earlier parts the parts which have been longest and most often 

 copied and emended, and are therefore most altered. Doubtless, 

 as in written histories, almost every embryonic legend and myth 

 is founded on fact ; but it is as hard in the one case as in the other 

 to dig the truth from the concreted mass of fiction. In some 

 instances the earlier history is not represented even by legend. It 

 is entirely lost, as in the case of plants which have ceased to 

 propagate by seeds, and increase only by means of detached 

 portions of the adult individual, such as buds and suckers. In 

 other cases, as among the medusae, whole volumes in the middle of 

 the history have been gradually shortened till they have quite 

 disappeared. 1 In all cases, if the individual lives to complete the 

 story, the last chapters are usually very full, and in the main 

 exact more full and exact than any written history can be. 

 Thus the offspring of the human being, however shortened and 

 altered its development, however vague its representation of its 

 remote ancestors, is always another human being who reproduces, 

 as a rule with wonderful completeness, all the immensely complex 

 details that go to the making of a man. But even here, as in a 



" In the history of the Hydroidae any phase, planuloid, polypoid, or 

 medusoid, may be absent." Dr Strethill Wright, quoted by Darwin; Animals 

 and Plants, vol. ii. p. 364. 



