Concurrence and Recapitulation 195 



seem, therefore, wise — speaking anthropomorphically — to 

 preserve these essential adaptations and give each new 

 generation the advantage of using them as so much capi- 

 tal or stock in trade. 



This sort of conservation the process of recapitulation 

 reveals. To expose each generation to the chances of 

 getting all their adaptations by chance variation with 

 individual accommodation would be most disastrous to 

 life ; hence the preservation of the great lines of ancestral 

 adaptation in each specific case. 



The part played by individual accommodation appears, 

 when the subject is looked at from such a point of view, in 

 the successive cases of the development of the hereditary 

 impulse in generation after generation. As pointed out by 

 the 'organicist' writers, and as maintained in this work, 

 an essential cooperation between heredity and accommo- 

 dation is actually shown in the development of every indi- 

 vidual that grows to maturity. There is thus a cooperation 

 in development followed by concurrence in evolution, and 

 the conservation of hereditary characters has to run the 

 gantlet of natural selection under this essential coopera- 

 tion in each case of life history. If, therefore, heredity, as 

 revealing recapitulation, is a conserving engine, in the sense 

 explained, then the decision as to how far it shall go and 

 what details shall be conserved, really rests with the process 

 of accommodation, in that it alone brings both hereditary 

 characters and also new variations to their fruitful maturity.^ 



1 The writer may say that the points made in this last paragraph (§ 5) 

 are so essentially biological, that he states them merely as general inferences 

 from the theory of orthoplasy, which nothing in his limited information con- 

 tradicts, and which he has not come upon in the literature. So far as true 

 they may be truisms, and so far as not truisms they may be not true, to pro- 

 fessed experts in zoology. 



