THE CYCLE OF LIFE 407 



last ; but especially in the making of organs do we see a 

 succession of individual stages which seem to correspond 

 to racial steps. The doctrine requires careful handling, 

 but we think that the facts still warrant us in upholding a 

 cautious statement of the ' Recapitulation Doctrine ' — 

 that the individual development of an organism is in some 

 respects hke a recapitulation, often much condensed and 

 telescoped, of the historical evolution of the race. 



In our Biology of the Seasons we have referred to another 

 general impression which arises from the study of young 

 animals — we are face to face with organic inertia on the 

 one hand and organic divergence on the other. On the 

 one hand, like tends to beget hke ; ' the child is as old as 

 its parents, a chip of the old block, a pendant from a con- 

 tinuous chain of germ-cells '. On the other hand, we see 

 ' the tendency to vary, to be something new, to be cre- 

 ative. The Uving creature is a Proteus. In a deep sense, 

 the httle child leads the race '. 



The old-fashionedness of young animals is often well 

 illustrated by their colour and markings. They tend to 

 show the primitive kind of colouration that results from 

 general physiological conditions, and the markings that 

 result from the rhythms of growth. This colouration 

 may be quite useful to the young animals, it often 

 seems to give them a garment of invisibility ; but it is 

 primarily a result of constitution, and no more utihtarian 

 than ripple-marks on the shore. Chalmers Mitchell shows 

 that if there are changes in subsequent development they 

 are usually of two kinds — (1) there is a blurring of the 

 original pattern and a toning down of the youthful spotti- 

 ness and emphasis, for in the adult struggle for existence 

 there are few things safer than the monotony of ' seK '- 



