488 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE RACE: 



since, and it is this sort of fact that we must include in 

 our conception of the living organism, of Animate Nature, 

 and of man in particular. That the innate defects as well 

 as the excellences of the fathers are continued in the chil- 

 dren far beyond the third and fourth generation is well 

 known. 



{d) Another general illustration of the past living on in 

 the present is to be found in the way in which the individual 

 development tends to recapitulate the racial evolution. Long 

 before the evolution idea was accepted, the suggestion was 

 made, e.g., by Meckel, von Bacr, and Louis Agassiz, 

 that the stages in individual development correspond to 

 grades of organisation in the animal kingdom. In post- 

 Darwinian days, Haeckel recognised the importance of the 

 recapitulation doctrine and stated it clearly in the light of 

 evolution. He called it the fundamental law of biogenesis, 

 and stated it in the familiar words: '' Ontogeny is a recapitu- 

 lation of Phylogeny." He also emphasised the contrast be- 

 tween palingenetic characters, which correspond to those of 

 the ancestral stock, and kainogenetic characters, which are 

 relatively recent additions. The latter, he said, may disguise 

 the former in a perplexing way; in any case, the recapitula- 

 tion is general, not exact, and often shows great condensation. 

 Fritz Miiller was another who did much to illustrate and 

 corroborate the recapitulation-idea, e.g., in his Fiir Darwin 

 (1864). 



The recapitulation doctrine has suffered considerably at 

 the hands of its friends, w^ho have sometimes stated it in 

 an exaggerated fashion. When Prof. Milnes Marshal said, 

 " Every animal in its own development repeats its history, 

 climbs up its own genealogical tree ", he was speaking pic- 

 turesquely, for the recapitulation is general, not detailed ; it 



