REPORT OF THE DIRECTOR I916 IO3 



the biologist, that of palingenesis, or recapitulation, or in other 

 words the broad and familiar statement of the fact that each 

 individual carries in himself and his development history, the 

 history of the race to which he belongs, however accelerated or 

 however retarded it may be. I am trenching familiar ground, but 

 it is because I would remind this audience that not the mere exist- 

 ence but the panorama of life is essential to this conception and that 

 the law remains only an assumption of probability as long as its 

 manifestations are pursued only among creatures of high specializa- 

 tion. In our bodies politic the more complicated our existence 

 becomes the more like a tangled web of ordinances become 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 hig'hly specialized organisms the leading of this great govern- 

 ing principle of biogenesis. If we do trip and fall among the 

 entanglements of the statutes, the difficult mechanism of our present 

 community life, let us remember that also back even of the bewilder- 

 ing, confusing, interlocking webs of the physiological mechanism 

 of evolution lies, outspoken and luminant, the simpler expressions 

 of the basic law on w^hich rests the whole superstructure of evolu- 

 tion whether of the individual or of the state. 



d It is well for us, Avell 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 

 insignificant minority struggling for its existence against an over- 

 burden of mechanical and vital obstacles, armed only with specific 

 virtues which have little by little fought their way into the fore- 

 ground, and by so doing consummated their upward purpose. If 

 I refer to the geological history of the phylum to which we belong, 

 the Mammalia, it may stand for the oft-repeated procedure which 

 has in various forms come under the notice of every paleontologist. 

 The Prototheria, or the first of all mammals, appeared upon the 

 scene in the Jurassic, diminutive, mouselike creatures even yet 

 retaining from reptilian ancestors the function of ovulation, pos- 

 sibly having already developed a marsupial pouch for their nurs- 

 lings, insectivorous in dentition, creeping inconspicuously through 

 sheltered places of the forests or among the crevices of the earth. 



