28 THE METHOD OF DEVELOPMENT 



written history of a recent generation, small details, unimportant 

 variations of the parent from the grandparent, are often omitted. 

 Nature is careful to store in the graphic record which is the develop- 

 ing body of the individual, only those facts that are important and 

 significant, only those variations which have played a real part in 

 the evolution of the race. When writing her history she concerns 

 herself, not with individuals, but with populations ; she preserves, 

 not the transient details of individual lives, the small variations 

 which appear in the parent and are lost in the child, but only 

 those great and enduring general movements by which whole 

 races or sections of races have differentiated from the ancestral 

 type. And her aim is strictly practical. Her history of ancestors is 

 told for the benefit of descendants. Therefore even great general 

 movements, when they grow remote, are eliminated from the 

 record, or are replaced by legend and myth if they interfere 

 with the smooth tenor of the narrative if they interfere with 

 the quick development of the child along the shortest and simplest 

 lines. 



51. Hitherto the doctrine of recapitulation has been accepted 

 by scientific men on the evidence of observed likenesses between the 

 embryos of the higher and the adults of the lower animals. It 

 has not yet been realized that, given the undisputed facts that the 

 organic world arose by evolution, and that the child recapitulates 

 the parental development, any method of development other than 

 that by the recapitulation of the life-history is literally incon- 

 ceivable. When Darwin, succeeding where Lamarck, Spencer, 

 and others had failed, converted a sceptical world to a belief in 

 evolution, these vague likenesses were held to furnish the strongest 

 proof in existence of his contention. Recently, however, some 

 embryologists, deceived by the frequent unlikenesses, have denied 

 the recapitulation of the life-history. According to them the 

 resemblances are due to a "sort of memory" possessed by the 

 embryo, a suggestion which may possess poetical merits. As a 

 fact, we should know the doctrine of recapitulation as true even if 

 an embryo resembling a lower type had never been seen, and it 

 had been ascertained merely that the embryos of different genera- 

 tions resembled one another as much as the adult individuals. The 

 function of an embryologist is not to furnish evidence for, or 

 against, a necessary truth ; but to ascertain to what extent this or 

 that type of animal or plant recapitulates its evolution with com- 

 pleteness and accuracy. It is no excuse to declare that only 

 complete and accurate recapitulation has been denied. No one, 



