CAUSATION AND SIMPLE ENUMERATION 55 



The deduced consequences are that developing individuals 

 >robably present traces of ancestral forms. The appeal to reality 

 the search for such traces. A successful appeal ends in the 

 liscovery of them and the proof of the induction. It is agreed on 

 11 hands that they do actually occur. 



85. Hitherto, biologists have always founded the notion that 

 development is a recapitulation of evolution on the evidence 

 supplied by embryos. Adopting the method of ' induction from 

 simple enumeration,' they have concluded that the developing 

 young of living beings often resemble organisms lower in the 

 scale of life than the adult type, and thence have deduced the 

 irther conclusion that the resemblance is due to a descent from 

 >wer forms. That which, rightly used, should have furnished 

 >ts, has been made the material on which was built the hypothesis 

 h has remained, therefore, a much controverted working 

 lypothesis. I have endeavoured to establish it as a theory, an 

 ivariable law, founded on facts of causation and tested by an 

 ippeal to reality. " It cannot be too often repeated, that we ought 

 lever to depend on frequency of occurrance, wherever it is 

 >ossible to have recourse to facts of causation." 1 " The notion of 

 :ause " is " the root of the whole theory of Induction." 2 The facts, 

 ill of which are patent, and the reasoning, some of which is 

 leductive, are before the reader. If now, bearing in mind the 

 mdisputed truth that offspring recapitulate (with variations) 

 >arental development, he is able to conceive individual develop- 

 lent, as anything other than a recapitulation, however altered, of 

 ic life-history of the race, he is capable of an intellectual feat 

 rhich is quite certainly beyond my powers. 



seen to be obviously inductive. To reach the notion that development is a 

 recapitulation of evolution we merely sum up the persistent variations of the 

 iccessive generations. 



1 Fowler, Inductive Logic, pp. 270-1. 



2 J. S. Mill, Logic, III. v. 2. If the reader disagrees with the notion that we 

 2ate better science when we link together our material by facts of causation 



ran when we simply enumerate likenesses and differences, it would be well if 

 he now broke the continuity of this work and, before proceeding further, read 

 chapters xviii. and xxv. Meanwhile, I should be glad if he took this problem 

 of recapitulation as a test case and asked himself which is the better science, 

 the disputable and often disputed guess that is founded on a simple enumeration 

 of the likenesses between embryos and lower forms of life, or the indisputable 

 truth that is demonstrated when, starting with the familiar generalisation that 

 offspring recapitulate the parental development, we establish a chain of causation, 

 and so reach the necessary conclusion that the development of the individual is 

 a brief and inaccurate rttsumt of the" evolution of the race ? 



