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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLV. No. 1154 



the Trias or even in the Lias, but belonged to so 

 few genera and species, or lived in such small com- 

 munities that they left no remains. 



This distinguished student cites 276 

 Tertiary species as indicative of their sud- 

 den outburst, or perhaps it would be safer 

 to say the development of better modes for 

 their preservation, and he has further 

 stated that there is no reliable observation 

 to prove that polymorphism was existent 

 among the earliest ants of this long period. 

 This differentiation does, however, show 

 itself in the fossil ants of the Quaternary. 



Tliis paramount attainment of intellec- 

 tual activity in the line of insect develop- 

 ment, in the line of the six-legged type, 

 would seem thus to have been accomplished 

 largely through the same period of time 

 when the human line was perfecting its 

 mentality. The psychology of the two ulti- 

 mate results is separated by processes and 

 directions of development as wide apart as 

 the poles. Neither is to be expressed, per- 

 haps, in terms of the other. The results 

 too are wide asunder — one a deadly com- 

 munism, a moribund partition of labor, a 

 lethal socialism; the other an active, pro- 

 gressive and fertile individualism. For the 

 former the student of nature's history sees 

 no outcome. These too are nature 's experi- 

 ments. The six-legged type with all its 

 purposes, in its highest expression lies pros- 

 trate on the ground at our feet, it and its 

 achievements have risen to nothing higher 

 than an ant hill, its communistic relations 

 and subservience are entirely apart from 

 the true genius of humanity. Socialism 

 and communism have been tried out and 

 found wanting, and nature holds conspicu- 

 ously before the eye of the state the warn- 

 ing that they have nothing either for the 

 growth of the spirit or the progress of the 

 intellect. 



(c) I regard as peculiarly a doctrine of 

 paleontology, one whose demonstration or 



confutation would be hopeless in the hands 

 of the biologist, that of palingenesis, or re- 

 capitulation, or in other words the broad 

 and familiar statement of the fact that each 

 individual carries in himself and his devel- 

 opment history, the history of the race to 

 which he belongs, however accelerated or 

 however retarded it may be. I am trench- 

 ing familiar ground, but it is because I 

 would remind this audience that not the 

 mere existence, but the panorama of life, is 

 essential to this conception and that the 

 law remains only an assumption of prob- 

 ability as long as its manifestations are 

 pursued only among creatures of high 

 specialization. In our bodies politic the 

 more complicated our existence becomes the 

 more like a tangled web of ordinances be- 

 come our statutes. Forty-five thousand 

 new statutes it is said have been enacted 

 in the last five years in these states for 

 some of us to trip and fall over, and just 

 as it is difficult to pick our way through 

 this tangle of expediential legislation, so 

 it is likewise difficult to read in highly 

 specialized organisms the leading of this 

 great governing principle of biogenesis. If 

 we do trip and faU among the entangle- 

 ments of the statutes, the difficult mechan- 

 ism of our present community life, let us 

 remember that also back even of the be- 

 wildering, confusing, interlocking webs of 

 the physiological mechanism of evolution 

 lies, outspoken and luminant, the simpler 

 expressions of the basic law on which rests 

 the whole superstructure of evolution 

 whether of the individual or of the state. 

 (d) It is well for us, well for the state, 

 that we read aright the teaching of the 

 greater past upon the doctrine of majority 

 control, for whatever enduring virtue it has 

 takes its roots in these past procedures of 

 life when laying the foundations of its 

 phyla. Over and over again the dominant 

 race has started on its career as an insig- 



