SUMMARY 29 



having even an elementary acquaintance with the facts, has alleged 

 that recapitulation is ever other than incomplete and inaccurate. 

 Thus no one has maintained that at one stage of human develop- 

 ment the embryo is a water-breathing animal, with all its structures 

 and faculties perfect, or that the ancient prototypes of the embryo 

 swam about dragging a placenta behind them. 



52. Summing up the foregoing, the question I wish to place 

 before the reader is this : If offspring recapitulate closely but not 

 exactly the parental development, if progression always implies a 

 complete recapitulation plus an addition, and retrogression an 

 incomplete recapitulation (with a step or steps subtracted), if 

 through all the ages offspring have always recapitulated the 

 main features of parental development, is it possible, or even 

 thinkable, that individual development can be anything other than 

 a recapitulation of the life-history not an exact recapitulation, but 

 one with additions and subtractions ? 



